The £5bn particle accelerator has operated for a year, generating billions of pieces of data in the hunt for the Higgs boson, nature's building block. But it hasn't been found and scientists are running out of places to look.
For almost 20 years, Bill Murray has been hunting the Higgs boson, the elusive subatomic particle that is thought to give mass to the basic building blocks of nature. In those two decades, the 45-year-old Edinburgh-born researcher has watched the search for the holy grail of physics narrow to a tighter and tighter group of targets – a process of elimination that has peaked over the past 12 months with the start-up of the Large Hadron Collider at Cern, the European particle physics laboratory. An avalanche of nuclear collisions – created by beams of high-energy protons smashing together – have been generated. But no trace of the Higgs has been found in the resulting nuclear debris.
Only a very narrow range of Higgs targets are now left – and some scientists are beginning to get twitchy, including Murray. "In 1993, I got a job by telling people that I wanted to find the Higgs," he says. "It is only in the last month that I have started to think that it might not exist after all."
Murray is not alone. "In the last year, we have eliminated most energy ranges that could contain the Higgs," says Sergio Bertolucci, Cern's director of research. "It is like pumping water out of a pond. We have virtually emptied the pond and have only a couple of muddy puddles left in which to find the Higgs. If it is not there, we will have to admit it does not exist."
And the search for dark matter can't be far behind.