Has Large Hadron Collider rival Tevatron found elusive ‘God particle’?

WASHINGTON - The Tevatron, the most powerful huge particle accelerator in the world after the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - housed at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois - is rumoured to have discovered the Higgs boson, or so-called “God particle”.

Tommaso Dorigo, a physicist at the University of Padua, writes about the speculation in his blog.

“It reached my ear, from two different, possibly independent sources, that an experiment at the Tevatron is about to release some evidence of a light Higgs boson signal,” The Telegraph quoted Prof Dorigo, as writing in the post, titled “Rumors about a light Higgs”.

He added: “Some say a three-sigma effect, others do not make explicit claims but talk of a unexpected result.”

Even as the LHC has bagged the larger share of media attention, the Tevatron has been quietly plugging away in the search for Higgs. In the 27 years since it was first completed it has discovered a quark and observed four different baryons.

Although it has not been able to find the elusive Higgs, it has narrowed the search, reducing the window of possible masses where it might be found.

In 2009, Fermi physicists said they expected to have enough data to discover or rule out the Higgs by early 2010, and gave themselves a fifty-fifty chance of finding it before the end of this year.

The Higgs boson is the last of the particles posited by the standard model of particle physics still to be found. It is said to explain why other particles have mass, and its discovery would confirm the standard model. If scientists ultimately rule out its presence, then other, previously less popular theories will have to be examined.

According to the New Scientist, more may be known when researchers present their findings at the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP), which opens in Paris on July 22. (ANI)