‘God particle’ a step closer

Melbourne – Scientists believe they have found the long-sought-after ‘‘God particle’’ that shapes the universe.

Teams of physicists from around the world believe they may have found proof of the theoretical Higgs boson, which confers mass – the key missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle that determines why nature is the way it is.

They had discovered a particle consistent with the Higgs boson, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) announced in Geneva and Melbourne yesterday.

While the teams involved in the experiments at the US$10 billion (NZ$12.4b) Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator near Geneva stressed that the results were preliminary, physicists could barely contain their excitement.

‘‘A new particle has been discovered that looks like the Higgs boson, and the dice are now loaded in favour of a discovery,’’ said the University of Liverpool’s head of particle physics, Professor Themis Bowcock.

‘‘Based on the Cern results alone, there appears to be less than one chance in a million that this is fake, which is roughly the same probability as flipping a coin heads up 21 times in a row,’’ Prof Bowcock said. The discovery of the Higgs boson represented a major breakthrough in our fundamental understanding of nature, he said.

Cern said the next step would be to determine the precise nature of the particle and its significance for our understanding of the universe, adding that this would take considerable time and data.

The man who first theorised the existence of the particle in the 1960s, British physicist Peter Higgs, said: ‘‘Really, it is incredible that this has happened in my lifetime.’’