GENEVA: The quest for answer to one of science’s greatest mysteries may be over. Hours before the official announcement of results of experiments conducted by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), a video ‘mistakenly’ posted on its website appears to confirm that elusive Higgs boson particle has been discovered.
The elusive Higgs boson or the "God Particle" is considered the last ingredient to the standard model of particle physics that may solve the fundamental questions about the formation of the universe. Higgs boson gives the particles that make up atoms their mass. Scientists have been hunting for it for almost 50 years.
Without this mass, these particles would zip though the cosmos at the speed of light, unable to bind together to form the atoms that make up everything in the universe, from planets to people.
"We've observed a new particle… We have quite strong evidence that there's something there. Its properties are still going to take us a little bit of time, but we can see that it decays to two photons, which tells us it's a boson," Joe Incandela, spokesman for the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, says in the video, dated July 4 2012.
"This is the most massive such particle that exists, if we confirm all of this - which I think we will."
"It may in the end be one of the biggest discoveries, or observations, of any new phenomenon that we've had in our field in the last 30 or 40 years," says Incandela.
The video was available to the public for a brief period of time and now exists in a password-protected part of the website.
The Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) will make the official announcement at 0700 GMT (12.30 pm IST). As per reports, five leading theoretical physicists have been invited to its next update in Geneva on the subatomic particle search, sparking speculation that the particle has been discovered.
The Large Hadron Collider, housed in an 18-mile tunnel buried deep underground near the French-Swiss border, smashes beams of protons -- sub-atomic particles -- together at close to the speed of light, recreating the conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.
If the physicists' theory is correct, a few Higgs bosons should be created in every trillion collisions, before rapidly decaying. This decay would leave behind a "footprint" that would show up as a bump in their graphs.
However, despite 1,600 trillion collisions being created in the tunnel, there have been fewer than 300 potential Higgs particles.