Tevatron may discover 'God particle' by 2011

London, Sept 2 (ANI): The Large Hadron Collider's (LHC) delay in starting up has benefited the Tevatron collider near Chicago, with officials at the facility saying that they now have a brighter chance of discovering the elusive Higgs boson, or 'God particle', by the year 2011.

"The Tevatron definitely has a chance," Greg Landsberg of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who works on one of the LHC's detectors, told New Scientist.

With the LHC due to restart only in November at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, the Tevatron has been gaining ground in the search for the Higgs, the particle thought to give mass to other elementary particles.

At the recent Lepton Photon conference in Hamburg, Germany, Tevatron physicists said that by early 2011, they would have recorded enough data to allow them to either find or rule out the Higgs as predicted by the standard model.

The LHC will have to sprint to catch up, and it won't be easy.

While the LHC's higher energies should produce more Higgs particles, it will also boost the production of other particles that can mimic a Higgs, according to Gordon Kane of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Telling between the two will require a precise understanding of how the LHC's detectors are working, which takes time to develop.

The LHC, however, could become the first to find particles of dark matter, a search for which the Tevatron is not well suited. (ANI)