This year's hunt for the Higgs boson is drawing to a close. On 30 October, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, will end its 2011 run of the proton–proton collisions that search for the elusive particle, thought to give other fundamental particles their mass.
But physicists believe that the collider will have collected enough data by the end of 2012, after experiments resume in March, to say whether the Higgs exists. In fact, they say, strong hints of whether or not it exists may be present in data already collected. "We are entering the golden year for the Higgs search," says Guido Tonelli, spokesman for the LHC's CMS experiment, one of the detectors that is used in the search for the Higgs boson, "and in the next few months we may be able to give important messages."
Sooner or later, they're going to catch this Higgs character. Happy Halloween! To read more, click here.