After years of experiments, proving the existence of the subatomic particle, which is said to give all matter in the universe its mass, seems closer.
Scientists said they have found “intriguing hints” that the Higgs boson exists but urged caution in drawing conclusions.
Oliver Buchmueller, a senior physicist on the team, said: “We see a small bump around the same mass as the Atlas team and that is intriguing. It means we have two experiments seeing the same thing and that is exactly how we would expect a Higgs signal to build up.”
Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director-general of Cern, added: “These are intriguing hints but please be cautious – we have not found it or excluded it yet.”
Looking for the Higgs boson at the LHC involves checking for a variety of events, or their absence, to rule out ranges of possible mass for the Higgs boson.
“Keep in mind these are preliminary results and we are talking about small numbers. The window for the Higgs mass gets smaller and smaller however it is still alive,” Heuer said.
Proving the existence of the Higgs boson would be a huge scientific breakthrough, filling in a blank in the commonly accepted Standard Model of how the universe is made up.
