Higgs particle speculation said premature

GENEVA, Switzerland, April 26 (UPI) -- Rampant speculation that particle physicists may have found the elusive Higgs boson particle, central to physics theories, is premature, experts say.

An internal memo at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or Cern, in Geneva, Switzerland, that was leaked to the Internet suggested researchers using the Large Hadron Collider had detected a signal compatible with the sought-after particle, the BBC reported Tuesday.

A Cern spokesman, while confirming the authenticity of the note, cautioned it has not been subject to rigorous scientific examination and could end up a false alarm.

"It's genuine, but what it comes from is a note written by a very small group of people in a large collaboration," James Gillies, director of communications at Cern, told BBC News.

"If those notes survive scrutiny, which is often not the case ... then the next stage in the peer review process is for them to go out to the collaboration as a whole.

"What was leaked was the first stage in that process ... at this stage we can't take it seriously and these things do come and go quite often."

In decades of attempts, no one has been able to detect the Higgs boson, central to the widely accepted theory of physics known as the Standard Model and thought to explain why all other particles have mass.