Scientists trash reports of God particle discovery

LONDON - Rumours that the Higgs boson - sometimes called the ‘God particle’ - has been detected by the Tevatron particle accelerator have been denied.

The Tevatron is a circular particle accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory or Fermilab, Illnois, US and is the second highest energy particle collider in the world after the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The Higgs boson has appeared in several works of fiction in popular culture, whose suspected existence is being determined by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva.

A spokesman for the Fermilab told the Telegraph: “The rumour of evidence for the Higgs boson is just that: a rumour, with no factual basis. Beyond that, we don’t comment on rumours.”

Earlier, the lab’s Twitter feed said: “Let’s settle this: the rumours spread by one fame-seeking blogger are just rumors. That’s it.”

The rumours had been flying around the internet since a physicist and blogger, Tommaso Dorigo of the University of Padua, said in a blog post that he had heard “two different, possibly independent sources” claiming that an experiment at the Tevatron had found convincing evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson.

However, Stefan Söldner-Rembold, a spokesman for the Dzero experiment at Tevatron and a professor of physics at Manchester University, said: “Tommaso Dorigo’s blog is not a reliable source and is in no way supported by us.”

“We will have new and exciting results from our SM Higgs searches at ICHEP [the International Conference on High Energy Physics, which begins in Paris next week], but no three-sigma evidence. More data are needed for that.”

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.

The Fermilab began work in 1983. In 1995 it was responsible for detecting the “top quark” that had been posited by quantum theory.

It was the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in history until the creation of the LHC at CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research), near Geneva.

The LHC is eventually expected to render it obsolete and Tevatron had been scheduled to shut down next year.

However, as the LHC project has suffered time-overruns, Tevatron is expected to remain competitive until 2014, and discussions over keeping it running until 2014 are underway.

There is a certain amount of friendly rivalry between the two laboratories.