Scientists at the world’s biggest atom smasher announce that they have gathered enough evidence to show that the long-sought “God particle” answering fundamental questions about the universe almost certainly does exist.

**The research in CERN’s vast complex on the Swiss-French border say the massive data they have obtained will essentially show the footprint of the key particle known as the Higgs boson all but proving it exists but doesn’t allow them to say it has actually been glimpsed.The Higgs boson, which until now was a theoretical particle, is seen as the key to understanding why matter has mass.

**CERN’s atom smasher, Large Hadron Collider, has been creating high-energy collisions of protons to help them understand suspected phenomena such as dark matter, antimatter and ultimately the creation of the universe billions of years ago, which many theorise occurred as a massive explosion, known as the Big Bang.

**The discovery of the Higgs boson won’t change people’s lives, but will help explain the underpinnings of the universe. It would confirm the standard model of physics that explains why fundamental particles have mass. Those particles are the building blocks of the universe. Mass is a trait that combines with gravity to give an object weight.

**The phrase “God particle,” coined by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman.

**“Boson” is derived from Satyendra Nath Bose, an Indian physicist from Kolkata who, in 1924, realised that the statistical method used to analyse most 19th-century work on the thermal behaviour of gases was inadequate. He first sent off a paper on quantum statistics to a British journal, which turned it down. He then sent it to Albert Einstein, who immediately grasped its immense importance, and published it in a German journal. Bose’s innovation came to be known as the Bose-Einstein statistics, and became a basis of quantum mechanics. Einstein saw that it had profound implications for physics; that it had opened the way for this subatomic particle, which he named, after his Indian collaborator, “boson.”

At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), two counter-rotating beams of protons accelerated to high energy are made to collide head-on to result in the creation of myriad particles, known and unknown. From the debris of trillions of such collisions, scientists look for signals characteristic of processes involving the Higgs boson. Higgs is a very short-lived particle with a lifetime of only about ten-thousandth of a billionth of a second. Once created, the Higgs boson will immediately decay into several channels and experiments analyse the final products of such decays and see if these really came from the decay of a Higgs boson.