Evidence for Higgs to be launched

BATAVIA, Illinois - Reuters

Physicists at a U.S. laboratory said on July 2 they have come tantalizingly close to proving the existence of the elusive subatomic Higgs boson -- often called the “God particle” because it may bring mass and order to the universe.

The announcement by the Fermi National Accelerator Lab outside Chicago came two days before physicists at CERN, the European particle accelerator near Geneva, are set to unveil their own findings in the Higgs hunt. CERN houses the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The Fermilab scientists found hints of the Higgs in the debris from trillions of collisions between beams of protons and anti-protons over 10 years at the lab’s now-shuttered Tevatron accelerator. But the evidence still fell short of the scientific threshold for proof of the discovery of the particle, they said.