• Scientists create world's tiniest drops of liquid in biggest atom smasher

    CMS Collaboration

    This three-dimensional view shows the proton-lead collision that produced collective flow behavior. The green lines are the trajectories of the subatomic particles produced by the collision, reconstructed by the CMS tracking system. The red and blue bars represent the energy measured by the instrument's two sets of calorimeters.

    By Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience

    Scientists think they've created the smallest drops of liquid ever — the size of only three to five protons.

    The droplets were made inside the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, where particles are sped up to near light speed and then smashed together. When researchers collided protons with lead nuclei, they were surprised to find that the result was teeny, tiny droplets of liquid.

    These liquid drops are minuscule, measuring about one-100,000th the size of a hydrogen atom or one-100,000,000th the size of a typical virus. [Dazzling Droplets: Photos Reveal Mini Worlds]

    The researchers consider the droplets liquid because they flow more like a liquid than like any other state of matter.

    "With this discovery, we seem to be seeing the very origin of collective behavior," Vanderbilt University physicist Julia Velkovska said in a statement. "Regardless of the material that we are using, collisions have to be violent enough to produce about 50 subatomic particles before we begin to see collective, flowlike behavior," added Velkovska, who is a co-convener of the heavy-ion program of the Compact Muon Solenoid, the LHC detector where the droplets were made.

    In fact, the droplets appear to be tiny bits of one of the hottest liquids known, called quark-gluon plasma. This plasma, essentially a soup of quarks and gluons (the subatomic ingredients of the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei), has been made at LHC and other particle accelerators before.

    When quark-gluon plasma was first discovered in the early 2000s inside the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, physicists initially thought it would behave as a gas does. Instead, they found it had liquid properties. Scientists think this plasma represents the state of the whole universe just moments after it was born in the Big Bang, when the universe was extremely hot and dense.

    The first artificial quark-gluon plasma was produced by smashing two gold nuclei together, and was later re-created with collisions of two lead nuclei. The CMS researchers wanted to test whether quark-gluon plasma could also be made by colliding a lead nucleus with a proton, which is 208 times less massive than lead; they expected these impacts would not be energetic enough to produce the plasma.

    "The proton-lead collisions are something like shooting a bullet through an apple, while lead-lead collisions are more like smashing two apples together: A lot more energy is released in the latter," Velkovska said.

    The results of the experiment were unexpected. In about 5 percent of collisions — those that were most violent — enough energy was released around the "bullet hole" where the proton smashed through the lead that some of the protons and neutrons there melted. This material seemed to form droplets of liquid about one-tenth the size of the quark-gluon plasma batches created by lead-lead and gold-gold impacts.

    Quark-gluon plasma is still a mysterious form of matter, and the scientists can't be absolutely sure yet that what they saw were liquid droplets. Further tests should help differentiate between that interpretation and other possible explanations of the results, the researchers said.

    Velkovska and her colleagues detailed their findings in a paper submitted to the journal Physics Letters B.

    Follow Clara Moskowitz on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook and Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

    Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

  • Second Higgs boson? Physicists debate new particle

    CERN/CMS/Taylor, L; McCauley, T

    The mass of the Higgs boson particle, possibly uncovered at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, may mean doom for our universe. Here, proton-proton collisions at the LHC showing events consistent with the Higgs.

    By Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience

    DENVER — The discovery of the Higgs boson is real. But physicists are cagey about whether the new particle they've found will fit their predictions or not.

    So far, the data suggest that the Higgs, the particle thought to explain how other particles get their mass, is not presenting any surprises, physicists said here Saturday at the April meeting of the American Physical Society. But that doesn't mean that it won't in the future — or that there might not be other Higgs bosons lurking out there.

    "There's a large number of theoretical models that predict, actually, that this Higgs field is more complicated," said Markus Klute, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Some of these theories predict five or more Higgs bosons of different masses, Klute told reporters. [The Top 5 Implications of Finding the Higgs]

    The mystery of the Higgs
    Physicists confirmed in March that a new particle discovered at the world's largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is, in fact, the Higgs boson. This particle, which weighs about 126 times the mass of a proton, appears to fit the Standard Model of physics, the dominant theory of particle physics. In this model, the Higgs boson is related to the Higgs field, an energy field that pervades space and is thought to imbue many particles with mass. The thinking goes that just as swimmers would get wet moving through a pool, as particles move through the Higgs field they would gain mass.

    This "vanilla" Higgs has been something of a disappointment to physicists hoping to find something that would upend their theories.

    "Sometime in November, I was depressed a little bit by the fact that everything lines up so well," Klute said. "They call this 'post-discovery depression.'"

    But researchers say there's more to learn about the Higgs, including whether it's the only one. It's possible that when the Large Hadron Collider revs up again in 2015 with more power, scientists may be able to detect heavier variations of the Higgs boson. Or variations may be hiding in the data collected already.

    "As far as 'Is the Higgs standard or not standard,' we're not in the game yet," said Michael Peskin, a physicists at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University. "We will be in the game later this decade, but right now it's just an open question."

    A secondary spike in Higgs data presented in December 2012 led to speculation that physicists had perhaps found a second Higgs boson of a different mass. However, that spike showed up in only one LHC experiment. Other lines of evidence produced at the collider have failed to show similar anomalies.

    Questions ahead
    The 17-mile-long (27 kilometers) underground loop that is the Large Hadron Collider is currently shut down until 2015 as engineers tinker to bring the atom smasher to its fullest potential. Upping the energy levels of the LHC will allow for more collisions, and up to five times the precision in measurements as seen today, Klute said.

    One popular theory physicists hope to put to an experimental test is "supersymmetry," which holds that every subatomic particle has a secret twin that has yet to be observed. "Superpartners" could help explain dark matter, a mysterious substance that may makes up a quarter of the entire universe.

    So far, physicists can only account for 4 percent of what the universe is made of, said Thomas Koffas, a physicist at Carleton University in Canada.

    "The remaining 96 percent," Koffas said, "we have no idea."

     Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

    Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

  • Higgs boson confirmation boosts physicists to higher energy

    The Higgs boson is believed to give other particles their mass. NBC's Brian Williams reports.

    By Miriam Kramer
    LiveScience

    An announcement Thursday confirming that a newfound particle discovered at the world's largest atom smasher last year is a Higgs boson — the theorized particle that could explain how other particles get their mass — has left physicists hopeful about the future of their research.

    Particle confirmed as a Higgs boson

    Although these newest findings confirming a Higgs — presented at the annual Rencontres de Moriond conference in Italy — have not led to the frenzied storm of excitement created by the particle's initial discovery on July 4, 2012, the work has still energized researchers.

    "There is better evidence now, but in some sense, it's also incredibly expected," Peter Woit, a physicist at Columbia University, told LiveScience.

    "It is very exciting to be here, and this year just has been quite exhilarating as a particle physicist!" Meenakshi Narain, a professor of physics at Brown University, wrote to LiveScience from the conference.

    Last year, physicists working with the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland declared that they had found a new elementary particle matching the findings that would be expected from the predicted Higgs boson, which was theorized by physicist Peter Higgs and his colleagues in 1964. The two experiments, named ATLAS and CMS, still needed further confirmation before physicists could state definitively that they had found the particle, however. [In Photos: Searching for the Higgs Boson]

    "When we discovered the particle, we knew we found something significant," ATLAS scientist and New York University professor Kyle Cranmer said in a statement. "Now, we're just trying to establish the properties."

    The results presented on Thursday are just one more step toward establishing those properties more firmly, Woit added.

    "The interesting thing today was that one of the experiments (the CMS) hadn't updated its data since the middle of last year," Woit said. "Everyone had been waiting to see what the new data was."

    Whereas the findings released in July 2012 were robust enough to confirm that a "Higgs-like" particle had been found, the newest science from the CMS refines some of the data, providing the strongest evidence yet that this is the particle predicted by the Standard Model, the reigning theory governing particle physics.

    "In coming years, it (the LHC) will study many more of them, and that's what people will be focused on, hoping to see something unexpected," Woit said. "No matter how hard one works at this though, one will only ever have partial information, never get to 100 percent sure that this particle is behaving exactly according to the theory."

    Narain agreed, "This of course increases our confidence that this is indeed a Higgs boson. At this point I don’t think there are many people in the particle physics community who seriously doubt that this is a Higgs boson. I am not sure it is meaningful to quantify this with a number such as 99 percent or 100 percent certain."

    Some think Thursday's announcement should not distract physicists as they work on the many other scientific questions that need to be answered.

    "Clear evidence that the new particle is the Standard Model Higgs boson still would not complete our understanding of the universe," Patty McBride, head of the CMS Center at Fermilab, said in a statement. "We still wouldn't understand why gravity is so weak, and we would have the mysteries of dark matter to confront. But it is satisfying to come a step closer to validating a 48-year-old theory."

    Follow us @livescience, Facebook or Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

    Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

  • Particle confirmed as a Higgs boson

    The Higgs boson is believed to give other particles their mass. NBC's Brian Williams reports.

    By Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience

    A newfound particle discovered at the world's largest atom smasher last year is indeed a Higgs boson, which is thought to play a role in how other subatomic particles get their mass, scientists reported Thursday at the annual Rencontres de Moriond conference in Italy.

    Physicists announced on July 4, 2012, that, with more than 99 percent certainty, they had found a new elementary particle weighing about 126 times the mass of the proton that could be the long-sought Higgs boson. The Higgs is sometimes referred to as the "God particle," to the chagrin of many scientists, who prefer its official name.

    But the two experiments, CMS and ATLAS, hadn't collected enough data to say the particle was, for sure, the Higgs boson, the last undiscovered piece of the puzzle predicted by the Standard Model, the reigning theory of particle physics.

    Now, after collecting two and a half times more data inside the Large Hadron Collider — where protons zip at near light-speed around the 17-mile-round (27-kilometer-round) underground ring beneath Switzerland and France — physicists say the particle is "a Higgs boson." But they can't yet rule out the possibility that other Higgs bosons exist as well. [In Photos: Searching for the Higgs Boson]

    "The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson, though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is," CMS spokesperson Joe Incandela said in a statement.

    ATLAS spokesperson Dave Charlton agreed, saying that the new results "point to the new particle having the spin-parity of a Higgs boson as in the Standard Model." In particle physics, "spin" refers to a quantum property of elementary particles and not to actual physical rotation.

    To confirm the particle as having the characteristics of a Higgs boson, physicists needed to collect tons of data that would reveal its quantum properties as well as how it interacted with other particles. For instance, a Higgs particle should have no spin, and its parity, or the measure of how its mirror image behaves, should be positive, both of which were supported by data from the ATLAS and CMS experiments.

    The scientists are not sure whether this Higgs boson is the single particle predicted by the Standard Model or perhaps the lightest of several bosons predicted to exist by other theories.

    Seeing how this particle decays into other particles could let physicists know whether this Higgs is the "plain vanilla" Standard Model Higgs. Detecting a Higgs boson is rare, with just one observed for every 1 trillion proton-proton collisions. As such, the LHC physicists say they need much more data to understand all of the ways in which the Higgs decays.

    From what is known about the particle now, physicists have said the Higgs boson may spell the universe's doom in the very far future. That's because the mass of the Higgs boson is a critical part of a calculation that portends the future of space and time. Its mass of 126 times the mass of the proton is just about what would be needed to create a marginally stable universe that could blink out of existence in a cataclysm billions of years from now.

    "This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now there'll be a catastrophe," Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., said last month at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

    "It may be the universe we live in is inherently unstable, and at some point billions of years from now it's all going to get wiped out," added Lykken, a collaborator on the CMS experiment.

    Follow LiveScience on Twitter @livescience, Facebook or Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

    This report was updated by NBC News.

    Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

  • Is it THE Higgs boson? Stay tuned

    CMS Collaboration / CERN

    This proton-proton collision, recorded with the Large Hadron Collider's Compact Muon Solenoid last year, shows the characteristics expected from the decay of the Standard Model Higgs boson to a pair of Z bosons. One of the Z particles subsequently decays to a pair of electrons (green lines and green towers), and the other Z decays to a pair of muons (red lines). The event could also be due to known Standard Model background processes

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    The subatomic particle discovered last year at Europe's Large Hadron Collider is looking more and more like the fabled Higgs boson, the one fundamental piece that's been missing from the theory that governs particle physics. But at a widely anticipated conference in Italy, physicists said they can't yet confirm 100 percent that this is the particle they're looking for.

    Ever since the "Higgs-like particle" was detected, researchers at the LHC have been trying to determine whether this is the one true Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model, or whether it's just one of several subatomic particles that play a role in imparting mass to other particles. There's even a chance that this particular particle something completely different, possibly linked to the way gravity works, said James Gillies, a spokesman for the CERN particle physics center on the French-Swiss border.

    CERN is the international organization in charge of operating the world's biggest and costliest particle accelerator.

    The key to confirming the particle's status is to determine a property known as spin, CERN says. If the new particle is spin-zero, then it's a Higgs boson. If it's spin-two, it's something else. The latest results, presented at the annual Moriond conference in La Thuile, Italy, can't yet rule out a spin-two particle, CERN said.

    "Until we can confidently tie down the particle's spin, the particle will remain Higgs-like," CERN research director Sergio Bertolucci said in a statement on Wednesday. "Only when we know that is has spin-zero will we be able to call it a Higgs."

    Physicists will continue to analyze the data collected at the LHC over the past couple of years, and there's a good chance they'll come up with the confirmation in the months ahead — even though the collider was shut down last month for an upgrade that's expected to require two years of work. That's not guaranteed, however. Raymond Volkas, a physicist from Australia's University of Melbourne, told New Scientist that Higgs-watchers might have to prepare themselves for the possibility that the LHC will never fully confirm the mystery particle to be the Standard Model Higgs.

    Last year, scientists were intrigued by an extra "peak" in the data from ATLAS, one of the LHC's main detectors. Some wondered whether that hinted at the existence of two Higgs bosons instead of just one. But now that more readings have been added to the analysis, the anomalous peak is fading.

    "When we first saw this excess a year ago, we were excited that it may be real physics and we hoped that by this time we would have a truly significant effect," the ViXra Log's Philip Gibbs writes. "This has not happened."

    Gibbs said that yet-to-be-released findings are said to throw even more cold water on the two-boson hypothesis. "This means that expectations of significant BSM [beyond Standard Model] effects from run 1 are now lower," he wrote.

    Update for 4 p.m. ET: The consensus appears to be that the results presented at the Moriond conference firm up the Standard Model's view of the subatomic world — which is a bit of a disappointment for those hoping to see clear signs of new physics. "It may well be a 'vanilla Higgs,' though there are still hints of unseen sprinkles," Robert Garisto, editor of the Physical Review Letters, joked in a Twitter update.

    "Vanilla" was also the word used by Caltech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll in his Twitter assessment, although Harvard's Lisa Randall replied that there was still a chance of getting "vanilla swirl." On his "Not Even Wrong" blog, Columbia mathematician Peter Woit says it's looking like a "garden-variety [Standard Model] Higgs, which is discouraging for hopes of hints about how to get beyond the Standard Model."

    The headline on Wired's report pretty much sums up the mood: "This Just In: Higgs Boson Still Boring."

    More about the Higgs boson:

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • Physicists set to share the latest word about subatomic Higgs quest

    CERN / CMS

    A computer visualization shows proton-proton collision events at the Large Hadron Collider that would be consistent with the behavior of the long-sought Higgs boson.

    By Clara Moskowitz
    LiveScience

    The latest news on a newfound particle that turned up last year at the world's largest particle accelerator will be announced at a conference beginning Saturday in Italy.

    The big question on scientists' mind is whether the particle truly is the long-sought Higgs boson, which has been predicted for decades but never seen ... until perhaps now.

    The teams behind the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN physics lab near Geneva, where the new particle was found, will present their analyses of the full set of data collected in 2012. The gathering, called the Moriond conference, runs from March 2 through 16 in La Thuile, Italy.

    The researchers announced their find in July 2012, and have been studying the particle's properties ever since in hopes of confirming it is in fact the Higgs. [Gallery: Search for the Higgs Boson]

    "Patience is the order of the day,” CERN’s research director, Sergio Bertolucci, said in a statement. "Everyone wants to know exactly what it is we've discovered, and that will come through a long and painstaking analysis. But the Higgs is just one part of a wide research program at the LHC experiments, and there will be plenty of other interesting physics at Moriond."

    The Higgs boson has been the missing piece of the Standard Model, which describes all the known subatomic particles in the universe. Theorized by physicist Peter Higgs and his colleagues in 1964, the particle is thought to be tied to a Higgs field that bestows mass on other particles.

    Researchers caution that the final word on the Higgs is unlikely to be handed down in the coming week.

    "Many people were hoping CMS and ATLAS, the two large multipurpose experiments operating at the LHC at CERN, would finally announce that the boson discovered last year is really a Higgs boson," LHC physicist Pauline Gagnon wrote on the physics blog Quantum Diaries. "Unfortunately, it is still too early to say. Nevertheless, both experiments can be expected to show interesting updates on the new boson mass measurement, decay rates and spin, all of which will provide a clearer picture."

    To determine if the new particle is actually the Higgs, scientists must study how it decays. The particle is exotic and short-lived, and almost immediately after being conjured in the accelerator, it decays into other, more mundane particle species. By studying the rates and patterns of these decays, the physicists hope to show that the new particle fits the properties predicted for the Higgs.

    The findings being presented at the conference include more precise measurements of these decays, which could be the key to confirming the particle's identity.

    "Precise measurements may not at first sight seem as exciting as discovering a new particle," Bertolucci said, "but it’s there that we really learn things. For example, a discrepancy with theoretical predictions for the signal strengths in any of the decay channels would be one of the strongest markers for new physics."

    Gagnon said she looked forward to learning whether the new particle decays in patterns that deviate from what is predicted by the Standard Model. If so, it could point to other new particles joining the mix, such as those predicted by a theory called supersymmetry.

    "Both ATLAS and CMS obtained sometimes more, sometimes less events containing the new boson than what is expected from the Standard Model, although these observations came with very large errors," Gagnon wrote. "An excess of events in the two-photon decay rate could indicate that new particles contribute to the process, a possibility that many theorists hope would reveal the presence of supersymmetry."

    Follow Clara Moskowitz on Twitter @ClaraMoskowitz or LiveScience @livescience. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

    © 2013 Space.com. All rights reserved. More from Space.com.

  • Large Hadron Collider shuts down to prepare for bigger bangs in 2015

    Slideshow: Building the biggest collider

    Get a look inside the caverns and tunnels that house the Large Hadron Collider, the world's biggest atom-smasher.

    Launch slideshow

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    After coming through with evidence for the long-sought Higgs Boson, Europe's Large Hadron Collider has begun a two-year "Long Shutdown," during which its underground components will be upgraded to run at even higher energies.

    The last interacting particle beams were extracted from the machine at 7:24 a.m. Thursday Geneva time, the CERN nuclear physics center said in a news release. Most of the final beam runs were conducted with lead ions as well as protons, to study the conditions that existed in the universe just after the big bang. CERN said single-beam studies will wind down this weekend, and then the LHC's super-cooled components will be brought up to room temperature so that work can begin.

    The "Long Shutdown 1," or LS1, marks the longest hiatus for the $10 billion collider since physics runs began in 2009.

    "We have every reason to be very satisfied with the LHC’s first three years," CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer said. "The machine, the experiments, the computing facilities and all infrastructures behaved brilliantly, and we have a major scientific discovery in our pocket."

    That discovery, announced last July, was the detection of a new subatomic particle fitting the expected characteristics of the Higgs boson, the last big piece of the puzzle for particle physics' Standard Model. The Higgs boson is thought to play a role in producing the rest mass of fundamental particles. Physicists are continuing to analyze data from the LHC's detectors and are expected to provide further details about the new "Higgs-like particle" in the weeks and months ahead.

    The LHC has been running at a top energy of 4 trillion electron volts, or 4 TeV per beam, but during the Long Shutdown, the facility's magnets and connections will be checked and upgraded to the point that it can run at its maximum design energy of 7 TeV per beam, starting in 2015. Problems with the LHC's magnets and connections bedeviled the collider during its construction phase: In 2008, a faulty connection caused an explosion that delayed the start of science operations for nearly a year. That incident led CERN to take a go-slower approach to ramping up the LHC's energy.

    Other parts of the facility will be upgraded during Long Shutdown 1, ranging from CERN's proton synchrotrons to the ventilation system for the LHC's 17-mile-round (27-kilometer-round) underground tunnel. 

    CERN reports on the start of the Large Hadron Collider's "Long Shutdown 1."

    CERN

    CERN details the upgrade work to be done at the LHC during 2013-14. Click on the graphic for a larger version.

    Detecting the Higgs boson was the top goal for the LHC's thousands of scientists, engineers and support personnel. During the next phase of operations, researchers hope to tease out insights about other mysteries, such as the nature of dark matter, the possibility that all subatomic particles have as-yet-unseen supersymmetric partners, and the potential existence of extra dimensions of space. So far, the LHC's research teams have reported no evidence of such exotic phenomena, but they're hoping that higher energies will reveal "new physics" beyond the Standard Model.

    Scientists won't be idle during the tunnel's shutdown: CERN's mass-storage systems are hanging onto 100 quadrillion bytes of data to analyze, most of which was acquired over the past year. CERN says that amount of data is equivalent to about 700 years' worth of HD-quality movies.

    "There will be plenty of physics to do during LS1, and not only at the LHC," CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci said. "The LHC is the flagship of CERN's experimental program, but is nevertheless just one component of a very varied research infrastructure. All of the other experiments here have ongoing analyses, so I'm looking forward to many interesting results emerging as LS1 progresses."

    More about the Large Hadron Collider:

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • CERN chief says Higgs boson quest might be wrapped up by midyear

    Michael Euler / AP

    Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director general for Europe's CERN particle physics center, gestures as he speaks during an interview with The Associated Press at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Saturday.

    By John Heilprin, The Associated Press

    DAVOS, Switzerland — The world should know with certainty by the middle of this year whether a subatomic particle discovered by scientists is a long-sought Higgs boson, the head of the world's largest atom smasher says.

    Rolf Heuer, director of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, said he is confident that "towards the middle of the year, we will be there." By then, he said reams of data from the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss-French border near Geneva should have been assessed.

    The timing could also help Scottish physicist Peter Higgs win a Nobel Prize, Heuer said in an interview with The Associated Press in the Swiss resort of Davos on Saturday.

    CERN's atom smasher helped scientists declare in July their discovery of a new subatomic particle that Heuer calls "very, very like" a Higgs boson, that promises a new realm of understanding the universe.

    The machine, which has been creating high-energy collisions of protons to investigate dark matter, antimatter and the creation of the universe, is being put to rest early this year. The data from it, however, takes longer to analyze.

    "Suppose the Higgs boson is a special snowflake. So you have to identify the snowflake, in a big snowstorm, in front of a background of snowfields," Heuer said by way of analogy. "That is very difficult. You need a tremendous amount of snowfall in order to identify the snowflakes and this is why it takes time."

    He said the Standard Model of particle physics describes only 5 percent of the universe, which many theorize occurred in a massive explosion known as the Big Bang.

    To explain how subatomic particles, such as electrons, protons and neutrons, were themselves formed, Higgs and others in the 1960s envisioned an energy field where particles interact with a key particle, the Higgs boson.

    The idea was that other particles interact with Higgs bosons, and the more they interact, the bigger their mass will be. But a big question remains: Is this new particle a variation of the Higgs boson, or the same as the single Higgs boson that was predicted?

    The phrase "God particle," coined by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman, is used by laymen, not physicists, more as an explanation for how the subatomic universe works than how it all started.

    "Now, if there is a deviation in one of the properties of this Higgs boson, that means we open a new window, for example, hopefully into the part of the dark universe, the 95 percent of the unknown universe," said Heuer.

    "If you find the deviation," he added, "that means if it is not the — but a — Higgs boson, then we might find a fantastic window into the dark universe so we would make another giant leap from the visible to the dark."

    Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.