'God Particle' Has Been Found?

It's expected that the scientists will say they are 99.99 percent certain the particle has been found, which is known as "four sigma" level.

But to claim a discovery, scientists have set themselves an aim for certainty that they call "five sigma" level of certainty with their results, so they are 99.99995 percent sure. This means that there is a probability of less than one in a million that their conclusions from the data gathered from the particle accelerator are the result of a statistical fluke.

The search for it only intensely began in the 1980s, first in Fermilab's Tevatron particle collider near Chicago and later in a similar machine at CERN, but most intensively since 2010 with the start-up of the European centre's Large Hadron Collider.

Joe Incandela, leader of one of the teams, told scientists at the CERN that the data has reached the level of certainty needed for a discovery.

The Higgs boson is considered as the key to understanding the universe. Physicists say its job is to give the particles that make up atoms their mass. Without this mass, these particles would zoom though the cosmos at the speed of light, unable to bind together to form the atoms that make up everything in the universe, from planets to people.

If the physicists' theory is right, a few Higgs bosons should be created in every trillion collisions, before rapidly decaying. This decay would leave behind a "footprint" that would illustrate as a bump in their graphs.  Nevertheless, despite 1,600 trillion collisions being created in the tunnel, there have been fewer than 300 potential Higgs particles.