Will CERN Scientists Really Unveil The Higgs Boson Tuesday?

The Higgs Boson has been one of the Holy Grails of physics for a long time and CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, has been embarking on one physics biggest quests to find it.

Hailed as the God particle, the Higgs Boson, which is still hypothetical, is believed to be fundamental in understanding why particles have mass. Scientists believe finding the Higgs Boson would provide them a better understanding of how the world operates at the sub-atomic level.

The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, which was built for hunting the Higgs Boson, smashes particles together to break them apart in order to find the God particle. It is a $10-billion machine is hosting the experiments from ATLAS and CMS, the two teams trying to find the God particle.

CERN has said it will be holding a seminar on Tuesday for scientists involved in the ATLAS and CMS experiments to present the status of their searches for the Standard Model Higgs Boson.

A press release from CERN has noted that the results the scientists will be presenting are based upon the analysis of much more data than those presented at the summer conferences.

The organization has said this is sufficient to make significant progress in the search for the God particle. However, it is not enough to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the Higgs.

But some physicists have high expectations in seeing the first glimpse of the Higgs Boson on Tuesday.

The BBC reported on Dec. 7, Professor John Ellis, a former head of theoretical physics at CERN, told BBC's Newsnight science editor Susan Watts that there is a growing sense of excitement at CERN.

I think we are going to get the first glimpse. The LHC experiments have already looked high and low for this missing piece, Ellis, now a guest professor at CERN, said. It could be that it weighs several hundred times the proton mass, but that seems very unlikely, then there's a whole intermediate range where we know it cannot be, then there's the low mass range where we actually expect it might be. There seem to be some hints emerging there... and that's what we're going to learn on Tuesday.

If a glimpse of the Higgs Boson is reported on Tuesday, it won't be the first time that has happened. In July, CERN scientists reported a glimpse of the Higgs boson particle but they later said that the signals faded and somewhat dashed hopes, at the time, of finding the God particle.

That there could be another glimpse of the Higgs Boson has once again excited those in the physics community and has sparked rumors of a discovery of the theoretical particle.

According to The New York Times Dennis Overbye, if the God particle exists, is expected to be heavier than 114.4 giga-electron volts (GeV, a unit of mass particle physicists use).

PhysicsWorld.com reported that the latest rumor, a very technical one, is that both ATLAS and CMS have evidence that the Higgs mass is about 125 GeV/C² at confidence levels of 3.5σ and 2.5σ respectively.

Prof Stefan Soldner-Rembold, from the University of Manchester, told the BBC that the quality of the LHC's results is exceptional but doesn't think that scientists will know for sure this year.

Within one year we will probably know whether the Higgs particle exists, but it is likely not going to be a Christmas present, Soldner-Rembold said. The Higgs particle would, of course, be a great discovery, but it would be an even greater discovery if it didn't exist where theory predicts it to be.

Researchers hope they will either find the particle by the end of next year or confirm that it doesn't exist in the form proposed by the Standard Model, which brings together elementary physical forces.

Do you think that CERN scientists will be presenting information of a glimpse of the Higgs Boson at tomorrow's seminar? Let us know why or why not in the comments box below.