US atom-smasher 'strongly' hints at finding God particle

US-based physicists reported Monday finding strong hints of the Higgs boson, the elusive "God particle" believed to give objects mass, but said European data is needed to confirm any potential discovery.

If physicists can confirm the existence of the Higgs boson, the last missing piece in the standard model of physics, the announcement would rank among the most important scientific breakthroughs of the last century.

The final findings from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in the midwestern US state of Illinois will be followed by the announcement of more definitive results from a potent European atom-smasher on Wednesday.

"Our data strongly point toward the existence of the Higgs boson, but it will take results from the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe to establish a discovery," said Fermilab spokesman Rob Roser.

The results come from 10 years of data from the Tevatron, a powerful atom-smasher that began its collider work in 1985 and closed down last year.

"During its life, the Tevatron must have produced thousands of Higgs particles, if they actually exist, and it's up to us to try to find them in the data we have collected," said Luciano Ristori, a physicist at Fermilab and Italy's National Institute for Nuclear Physics, or INFN.

"We have developed sophisticated simulation and analysis programs to identify Higgs-like patterns. Still, it is easier to look for a friend's face in a sports stadium filled with 100,000 people than to search for a Higgs-like event among trillions of collisions."

The Higgs boson, named after Scottish physicist Peter Higgs, was first described in the 1960s and has been notoriously difficult to pin down.

"The Higgs boson is special," Fermilab theoretical physicist Joe Lykken told reporters, adding that the tough-to-find elementary particle "gets at why the universe is here in the first place."

Lykken said it can be thought of almost like an energy field that gives mass to objects. But it decays almost immediately into other particles.

Furthermore, just one in a trillion collisions in an atom-smasher experiment will produce a Higgs boson.

"This is much worse than a needle in a haystack," Lykken said, adding that he and many other physicists are eagerly anticipating the European results. "We think we are getting very, very close to where we want to be, and by the end of the week we may be much closer."

The Tevatron results show that the Higgs particle, if it exists, has a mass between 115 and 135 gigaelectronvolts (GeV/c2), or about 130 times the mass of the proton.

Based on two experiments, known as CDF and DZero which include nearly 1,000 physicists from more than a dozen different countries, the team found that there is only a one-in-550 chance that the signal is a mere statistical fluke.

However, the statistical significance of the signal measures 2.9 sigma, and is not strong enough to meet the five sigma threshold required to say whether or not the particle has been discovered. (CHICAGO =AFP)