A momentous day for science as teams discover the elusive ‘God particle’

Teams at the £2.6bn Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva say they have found a new sub-atomic particle “consistent” with the legendary Higgs boson.

Dr Dan Tovey from Sheffield University, who worked with researchers at Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, described it as “ potentially the biggest breakthrough in fundamental physics for at least 30 years.”

He added: “The focus of our work will now turn to measuring precisely the properties of the new particle, confirming that they match those expected for the Higgs boson.”

The results are preliminary and more work is needed before the scientists can be sure of what “species” of particle they have captured. But observations carried out so far show it looks and acts like how they would expect the long-sought particle, which has eluded them for 50 years, to behave.

Finding it is vital to the Standard Model, the theory describing the web of particles, forces and interactions that make up the universe. Without the Higgs boson to give matter mass and weight, there could be no Standard Model universe.

Prof John Womersley, chief executive of the Science and Technology Research Council, said: “They have discovered a particle consistent with the Higgs boson. It’s a momentous day for science.”

At the LHC, scientists shoot two beams of protons - the “hearts” of atoms - at each other at almost the speed of light.

When they smash together the enormous energies involved cause them to decay into an array of more fundamental particles. These may then decay further into yet more particles and by following the patterns of decay, scientists have been hoping to see the “fingerprint” of the Higgs boson.

In December last year, LHC scientists revealed they had caught the first glimpses and since then have sifted through vast quantities of data in an effort to reduce the chances of being wrong.

Yesterday they confirmed two of the Large Hadron Collider’s giant detectors, CMS and Atlas, had delivered results that reached the definitive “five sigma” level of proof.

A sigma is a measure of how likely it is that a finding is down to chance. At five sigma, the likelihood of a statistical fluke is one in a million.

Prof Peter Higgs, the retired British physicist who dreamed up the concept of the Higgs mechanism, could now be on his way to winning a Nobel prize. He was among the guests at Cern in Geneva to hear the news.