By Brian Vastag and Joel Achenbach, Tuesday, December 13, 10:00 AM

Scientists said Tuesday morning that they’re homing in on the Higgs boson, the elusive theoretical particle that’s believed to play a key role in the fabric of the universe.

While researchers haven’t found the Higgs conclusively, one of them said there was an “excess of events” detected in particle-collider experiments that hints at where the Higgs could be found.


The announcement of new data obtained by experiments conducted by two teams at the Large Hadron Collider, the huge apparatus near Geneva, was closely followed by the global physics community.

No one expected a definitive discovery, and none was announced. But scientists who gathered in an auditorium for a seminar this morning at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) erupted in sustained applause at what seems to be a major step toward a scientific breakthrough.

The scientists don’t know the mass of the Higgs. But the latest experiments have excluded a lot of possibilities.

Fabiola Gianatti, a physicist representing the experiment named ATLAS, said that if the Higgs exists, its mass most likely is somewhere in the range of 115.5 to 131 billion electron volts (GeV), which is roughly 115.5 to 131 times the mass of a proton. That would support the Standard Model of particle physics and be in a range where further scrutiny might turn up more definitive proof.

“It would be a very nice region for the Higgs to be,” one of Gianatti’s slides said. But another slide cautioned: “It’s too early to draw definite conclusions.”

At the end of the seminar, CERN director-general Rolf-Dieter Heuer cautioned the assembled scientists against concluding too much.

“The window for the Higgs mass gets smaller and smaller. But it is still alive,” Heuer said. “Be careful, it’s intriguing hints in several channels in two experiments. But please be prudent. We have not found it yet.”

In a news release, CERN said: “Tantalizing hints have been seen...but these are not yet strong enough to claim a discovery.”

For weeks, statements circulating on physics blogs had hinted at the discovery of an elusive particle essential to our understanding of how the universe works.

Confirmation of the Higgs would solve the mystery of why matter has the property that physicists call mass — the resistance to being shoved around. If the Higgs is declared non-existent, on the other hand, there would be a gaping hole in physicists’ explanation of nature’s deepest structure.

Because it has such cosmic significance, the Higgs is often referred to in the media as “the God particle,” the title of a book by physicist Leon Lederman. The particle’s more orthodox name is in honor of theorist Peter Higgs, who predicted its existence in 1964.

These new results are “sufficient to make significant progress in the search for the Higgs boson, but not enough to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the Higgs,” read a CERN statement announcing the news conference Tuesday.

Translation: We’re inching closer, but we’re not there yet.

Seems we are getting closer to understanding the creation of the universe.

126 GeV

phyicists riducule the nothion that the higgs bosen is "the god partical."