A computer screen is pictured before a scientific seminar to deliver the latest update in the search for the Higgs boson at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Meyrin, near Geneva July 4, 2012.

GENEVA | Thu Mar 14, 2013 11:08am EDT

GENEVA (Reuters) - Physicists who last summer triumphantly announced the discovery of a new particle but held back from saying what it was, declared on Thursday there was now little doubt it was the long-sought Higgs boson.

Latest analysis of data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator, where the boson was spotted as a bump on a graph early in 2012, "strongly indicates" it is the Higgs, said CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.

Physicists believe the boson and its linked energy field were vital in the formation of the universe after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago by bringing flying particles together to make stars, planets and eventually humans - giving mass to matter, in the scientific jargon.

The particle and the field, named for British physicist Peter Higgs who predicted their existence 50 years ago, are also the last major missing elements in what scientists call the Standard Model of how the cosmos works at the very basic level.

But the CERN statement stopped short of claiming a discovery - which would clear the way to Nobel prizes for scientists linked to the project - and floated the idea that this might be an exotic "super-Higgs" offering a key to new worlds of physics.

"It remains an open question whether this is the Higgs boson of the Standard Model ... or possibly the lightest of several bosons predicted in some theories that go beyond the Standard Model," said CERN, a large complex on the edge of Geneva.

"Finding the answer to this question will take time."

Although some CERN physicists privately expressed irritation at the continuing refusal to - as one said - "call a Higgs a Higgs", others argued that this could only come when the evidence was all totally irrefutable.

If it is not what one CERN-watching blogger has dubbed a "common or garden Higgs" but something more complex, vistas into worlds of supersymmetry, string theory, multiple dimensions and even parallel universes could begin to unfold.

WHAT KIND OF HIGGS?

"To me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson, though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is," said Joe Incandela, spokesman for CMS, one of the two independent CERN LHC monitoring teams.

"There is every possibility that it is a Higgs boson from a more complex model, such as supersymmetry (a theory which says every elementary particle has a so-far unseen heavier partner)," another CMS researcher, John Conway, told Reuters.

In recent months, rumors have flown that the particle might be some sort of super-Higgs - "the link between our world and most of the matter in the universe" as predicted by U.S. physicist Sean Carroll in a new book.

But David Charlton, who speaks for the ATLAS team, said the latest analysis, presented on Thursday to a conference in the Italian Alps, pointed to the particle fitting the Standard Model - which would exclude exotica.

However, CERN scientists agree nothing startlingly new could be expected until much later in the decade, well after the LHC - shut down last month for two years to allow its power and reach to be doubled - resumes operations in early 2015.

In the giant subterranean collider, which started up in March 2010, particles are smashed together hundreds of times a second at near the speed of light to simulate the Big Bang. The debris is then tracked on huge detectors.

But the new particle turns up only once in every trillion collisions - leaving the thousands of physicists and analysts at CERN, and in laboratories around the world, the massive task of deciding what data to discard.

(Reporting by Robert Evans; Editing by Pravin Char)

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A computer screen is pictured before a scientific seminar to deliver the latest update in the search for the Higgs boson at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Meyrin, near Geneva July 4, 2012.

GENEVA | Wed Dec 19, 2012 3:07pm EST

GENEVA (Reuters) - Scientists at Europe's CERN research center said on Wednesday they may be able to definitively announce at a conference next March that they had discovered the elusive Higgs boson.

But they dismissed suggestions circulating widely on blogs and even in some science journals that instead of just one type of the elementary particle they might have found a pair.

CERN researchers said in July they had found what appeared to be the particle that gives mass to matter, as imagined and named half a century ago by theoretical physicist Peter Higgs. But they stopped short of saying for sure it was the Higgs boson, pending further research.

"The latest data we have on this thing we have been watching for the past few months show that it is not simply 'like a Higgs' but is very like a Higgs," said Oliver Buechmuller of the CMS team at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

"The way things are going, by the Moriond meeting we may be able to stop calling it Higgs-like and finally say it is the Higgs," he told Reuters, referring to the annual gathering which will take place at the Italian Alpine resort of La Thuile, 120 kilometers (75 miles) from CERN, on March 2-9.

Suggestions that there may be two Higgs, a particle that made formation of the universe possible after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, emerged after a progress report by CERN scientists last week. Its definitive discovery that would almost certainly win a Nobel Prize.

Commentators, including one in the journal Scientific American, said differing measurements - so far unexplained - of the new boson's mass that were recorded by ATLAS - a parallel but separate research team to CMS at CERN, indicated there might be twin particles.

"That is quite an exaggeration," said Pauline Gagnon, a scientist with ATLAS. "The facts are so much simpler: we measure one quantity in two different ways and obtain two slightly different answers.

"However, when we combine all the information, we clearly get only one value. Since we have checked all other possibilities, it really looks like a statistical fluctuation. Such things happen."

Buechmueller, whose CMS team found no such variation in their measurements, said he agreed there was no special relevance in the ATLAS discrepancy. "It will probably disappear when more data is in and analyzed," he added.

The $10-billion Large Hadron Collider, a 27-km (17-mile) circular construct deep under the Franco-Swiss border, will shut down for some two years in February to allow a doubling of its power and its capacity to probe cosmic mysteries

(Reported by Robert Evans; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

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