Boffins inch closer to discovering elusive "God particle"

Washington, July 27 (ANI): Scientists have made a huge advance towards the discovery of the elusive Higgs Boson or the so-called "God particle", results announced by researchers at the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) in Paris indicate.

The Higgs Boson, if discovered, could help unravel several mysteries about the makeup of the Universe.

These latest results - obtained by the scientists at Fermilab's DZero and CDF projects - significantly narrow down the possible mass range of the Higgs boson particle, ruling out a quarter of the mass range that has previously been thought possible.

To obtain the latest Higgs search result, CDF and Dzero's analysts separately sifted through more than 500,000 billion proton-antiproton collisions that each experiment has studied since 2001. After the two groups obtained their independent Higgs search results, they combined their results to produce the joint exclusion limits of the Higgs particle's mass.

Both the DZero and CDF projects have a strong UK involvement which is funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).

Stefan Soeldner-Rembold, of the University of Manchester, who leads the international DZero Experiment as one of its spokespersons said: "Our latest result is based on about twice as much data as a year and a half ago. As we continue to collect and analyze data, the experiments will either exclude the Standard Model Higgs boson in the entire allowed mass range or we'll go on to see first hints of its existence. There is less and less room for the Higgs boson to hide now."

STFC's Director of Science Programmes, Professor John Womersley, who also formerly led the DZero experiment for several years, said: "There are important pieces missing in our understanding of the basic building blocks of the universe and these results are an important step in learning how our universe works and why it exists. STFC is proud to support the U.K. scientists who are playing such a strong role this area of research at this key time."

In addition to the announcement of these results, this year's ICHEP in Paris is the first conference where physics results obtained at the Large Hadron Collider have been presented.

CERN Director General, Rolf Heuer, presented measurements from the first three months of successful LHC operation, at an energy three and a half times higher than has previously been achieved at a particle accelerator

The Higgs boson particle was originally proposed by British theoretical physicist Professor Peter Higgs as a solution to one of the most basic puzzles in particle physics - why some particles possess mass and others do not. Since then scientists could only speculate about the existence of the Higgs particle, but thanks to current research and experiments being carried out at the Large Hadron collider at CERN in Switzerland and the Tevatron Collider at Fermilab in the US, a glimpse of the Higgs boson particle could soon be a closer reality. (ANI)