CERN gripped by Higgs boson fever

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GENEVA, Switzerland, July 3 (UPI) -- Higgs boson fever has gripped Cern, the particle physics laboratory in Switzerland that is home to the Large Hadron Collider, colleagues say.

Two teams of physicists at Cern will announce the results of their latest efforts to discover the particle, first proposed in 1964 by Edinburgh University physicist Peter Higgs.

Researchers say it is the most sought-after particle in modern science.

The Guardian said rumors and leaks from CERN suggest researchers have seen compelling evidence for the particle, though perhaps not enough to claim an official discovery that would be proof of an invisible energy field that fills the vacuum of space.

The theory is the Higgs energy field switched on a trillionth of a second after the big bang that flung the universe into existence.

"If something significant and new is found on Wednesday that would be fantastic, but we're not going to know firstly that it's a Higgs boson, or secondly what kind of Higgs particle it might be, until we've made a much more thorough investigation of how it behaves," Tara Shears, a particle physicist from Liverpool University who works at the lab, told the newspaper.