After a quest spanning nearly half a century, physicists yesterday said they had found a new sub-atomic particle consistent with the Higgs boson, which is believed to confer mass.

This discovery may shed light on how matter came into being at the very start of the universe, a thousandth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang

Rousing cheers and a standing ovation broke out at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) after scientists presented data in their long search for the mysterious particle.

The new find is “consistent with (the) long-sought Higgs boson,” Cern declared in a statement.

It added further data was needed to identify the find.

“We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature,” said Cern director General Rolf Heuer.

“The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle’s properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe.”

Peter Higgs, a shy, soft-spoken British physicist who published the conceptual groundwork for the particle, back in 1964, expressed joy.

“I never expected this to happen in my lifetime and shall be asking my family to put some champagne in the fridge,” he said in a statement issued by the University of Edinburgh, where he was a professor.

Finding the Higgs would validate the Standard Model, a theory that identifies the building blocks for matter and the particles that convey fundamental forces.

It is a hugely successful theory but has several gaps, the biggest of which is why some particles have mass but others do not.

Mooted by Higgs and several others, the boson is believed to exist in a treacly, invisible, ubiquitous field created by the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago.

When some particles encounter the Higgs, they slow down and acquire mass, according to the theory. Others, such as particles of light, encounter no obstacle.

Cern uses a giant underground laboratory where protons are smashed together at nearly the speed of light, yielding sub-atomic debris that is then scrutinised for signs of the fleeting Higgs.

The task is arduous because there are trillions of signals, occurring among particles at different ranges of mass.

Over the years, tens of thousands of physicists and billions of dollars have been thrown into the search for the Higgs, gradually narrowing down the mass range where it might exist.

Two Cern laboratories, working independently of each other to avoid bias, found the new particle in the mass region of around 125-126 Gigaelectronvolts (GeV), according to data they presented yesterday.

“This discovery may shed light on how matter came into being at the very start of the universe, a thousandth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang,” said Cern physicist Yves Sirois.

“It may be the Higgs boson, but it may also be something far bigger, which opens the door towards a new theory that goes beyond the Standard Model.”

Maltese scientist ‘excited’ by news

Maltese researcher Nicholas Sammut, who has worked at Cern, said he was “obviously very excited” by the discovery.

Dr Sammut, who is also CEO and vice-chairman of the Malta Council of Science and Technology, said finding this signature “is one of the main reasons the LHC machine was built”.

With Maltese researchers Gianluca Valentino, Nicholas Aquilina, Marija Cauchi and Pierluigi Mollicone, Dr Sammut is conducting research at Cern on controlling the beam particles and the collimation (particle beam cleaning) systems.

“The Higgs boson is a very important particle that ties many unknowns in the foundation of science itself. It is responsible for the mechanism of mass and without it, the world we live in would be a very different place,” Dr Sammut said.

For example, if the electron had no mass, there would be no people.

Specifically, the Maltese team developed the Field Description of the , which provides the superconducting magnet transfer functions to control the machine.

Factfile

What is the Higgs boson?

• The Higgs boson is conceived as existing in a treacly, invisible field that was created after the Big Bang and pervades the universe. Higgs bosons “stick” to fundamental particles of matter, dragging on them, and then decay themselves into another form.

Some of these particles interact more with the Higgs than others and thus have greater mass, according to the theory.

Why is it called so?

• The name comes from a British physicist, Peter Higgs, today aged 83, who conceived of a field of mass-conferring particles in 1964 and became the first to publish his idea.

Important theoretical work was also done separately by Belgian physicists Robert Brout, who died in 2011, and François Englert, 79.

Why is it important?

• The origin of mass − meaning the resistance of an object to being moved – has been fiercely debated for decades.

Finding the Higgs boson vindicates the so-called Standard Model of physics, a theory that developed in the early 1970s, which says the universe is made from 12 particles that provide the building blocks for all matter.