Finally, physicists may have gotten a long-awaited prize with the latest data release from the Large Hadron Collider on Dec. 13, which show a possible signal for the elusive Higgs boson at around 125 gigaelectronvolts (GeV).
Two separate experiments confirm a small rise in the number of certain particle decay events occurring in a particular energy range. This could be a sign of the Higgs particle, which is a manifestation of the Higgs field required to give subatomic particles their mass.
The ATLAS experiment sees a signal consistent with a 126 GeV Higgs while the CMS collaboration reports an excess of events at 124 GeV. (A hydrogen atom is approximately 1 GeV, so if this were the Higgs particle it would be roughly equivalent to the mass of a cesium atom.) Even if this signal is not from the Higgs, both experiments narrowed down the range in which the Higgs particle could possibly show up, leaving only a small window between approximately 115 and 130 GeV. via Wired
December 13, 2011
