A wealth of new data has made scientists even more confident the elusive “God particle” is in their grasp.
The sub-atomic particle is looking increasingly like some form of Higgs-boson.
Physicists have spent decades searching for the particle which, according to theory, gives matter mass.
The new particle was detected within the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the French-Swiss border last year,
A key unanswered question is what strain of Higgs particle the new find might be. Evidence points to it being the kind of Higgs-boson predicted by the conventional “Standard Model” theory of what makes the universe tick.
But there remains a possibility that it could be one of several lighter versions postulated by more radical theories.
LHC scientists attending the Moriond Conference in La Thuile, Italy, presented the latest findings after analysing two and a half times more Higgs data than was available last summer.
Professor Jon Butterworth, from University College London, a member of the international team working on the LHC’s Atlas detector, said: “The evidence mounts that this new boson is something very like the Higgs boson of the Standard Model.
“We have to keep working at it, but on the face of it this means the Standard Model is a much more powerful theory than many physicists suspected.”