The European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, will provide on July 4 an update on the elusive 'God particle' - scientifically referred to as the Higgs boson - a subatomic particle, which if found, could explain how particles acquire their mass.
The organization was carrying out the search for the particle using an atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which recreates a "Big Bang", namely the conditions that existed early in the evolution of the universe, on a microscale.
Two large experiments - ATLAS and CMS, were being conducted at the LHC to analyze the myriad of particles produced by the collisions in the accelerator.
CERN's Director for Accelerators and Technology, Steve Myers, said that he was looking forward to preliminary data from these experiments, which come "after a very successful first period of LHC running in 2012."
While the ATLAS detector is searching for new discoveries in the head-on collisions of protons of extraordinarily high energy, the CMS particle detector is designed to see a wide range of particles and phenomena produced in high-energy collisions in the LHC.
Sergio Bertolucci, CERN Director for Research and Computing, said, "We now have more than double the data we had last year that should be enough to see whether the trends we were seeing in the 2011 data are still there, or whether they've gone away. It's a very exciting time."
A statement from CERN read: "If and when a new particle is discovered, ATLAS and CMS will need time to ascertain whether it is the long sought Higgs boson, the last missing ingredient of the Standard Model of particle physics, or whether it is a more exotic form of the boson that could open the door to new physics."
According to Big Bang theory, the theory which describes the evolution of the universe over time, our universe is thought to have begun as infinitely small and searingly hot fundamental particles, which over the course of time cooled to 1000 billion degrees, resulting in the combination of those minute particles into composite particles like protons and neutrons.
CERN has scheduled the scientific seminar on July 4 at 9:00 CEST in Geneva, coming on the eve of this year's major particle physics conference, ICHEP, in Melbourne.
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