BATAVIA, Ill., July 25 (UPI) -- A U.S. particle accelerator may have seen hints of the elusive Higgs boson after recent reports of similar glimpses at Europe's Large Hadron Collider lab.
Researchers have been analyzing data from the Tevatron machine at Fermilab near Chicago in a search for the sub-atomic particle considered a cornerstone of modern particle physics theory, the BBC reported Monday.
The possible results seen at the Tevatron are weaker than those reported at the collider at CERN in Switzerland, but occur in the same "search region," researchers said.
When the U.S. and European results are examine together the lead to "intriguing" possibilities, researchers said, although they caution these "hints" could disappear with further analysis.
The European collider, housed in a 16.7-mile-long circular tunnel below the French-Swiss border, has two detectors looking for the Higgs, while the Tevatron has a similar arrangement of two detectors.
On Friday, the CERN teams reported finding what physicists call an "excess" of interesting particle events at a certain energy level, while U.S. researchers have also seen hints of something at about the same energies.
The existence of the Higgs boson was first proposed in the 1960s and thought to help confer the property of mass on all other particles.
Scientists are searching for evidence of the Higgs as the last missing piece in the Standard Model, the most widely accepted theory of particle physics that explains how the known sub-atomic particles interact with each other.
If the Higgs boson does not exist, physicists would have to modify the theory to propose some other mechanism to explain where particles get their mass.
