After a 10-year search, two experiments from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois report hints of what may be the Higgs boson. The finding bolsters results announced last year from CERN’s LHC experiments, which may have spotted the elusive particle at around 125 gigaelectronvolts (GeV). 
 
 “A worldwide picture is starting to form that is making us excited at some level,” said physicist Rob Roser, co-spokesman for the CDF collaboration, one of the two Fermilab experiments reporting the new results. 
 
 The Higgs boson is the final piece of particle physicists’ greatest puzzle. According to the Standard Model — which describes the interactions of all known particles and forces in the universe — the Higgs is what provides other particles their mass. 
 
 Scientists in charge of the two detectors on Fermilab’s Tevatron particle collider, CDF and DZero, announced that they have seen a small excess of events between 115 and 135 GeV that could correspond to the mysterious Higgs on March 7, during a particle physics conference in Moriond, Italy. 
 
 Though the Tevatron, once the world’s premier particle accelerator, was shut down in September, scientists are still analyzing mountains of data generated by collisions between protons and antiprotons zipping around the 4-mile-long track. These records have already turned up interesting results, such as a new, more precise measurement of the W boson’s mass. 
 
 Because the Tevatron and LHC experiments search for the Higgs through slightly different means, the combined results make a compelling case for the particle at this energy. But neither collaborations’ findings pass the rigorous statistical significance required to claim a discovery in particle physics. 
 
 “We see some tantalizing evidence but not significant enough to make a stronger statement,” said Roser. 
 
 Though he is cautiously optimistic about the findings, he says that he wouldn’t bet his house or even his neighbor’s house for a while. 
 
 By the end of 2012, the LHC should quadruple its current amount of data, which may allow scientists to definitively confirm or rule out these Higgs hints. Many physicists are hoping that, in addition to the Higgs verification, they will find new, exotic particles, which may point to physical theories beyond the Standard Model. 
 
 Image: Fermilab, Reidar Hahn ||||| Beate Heinemann, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley , who has been deeply involved in analyzing data from the Large Hadron Collider, said recently of the CERN results, “This very much smells like the Higgs boson.” But, she noted, the signal could also go away when more data is obtained. 
 
 The Higgs boson is the key piece of the Standard Model, an ambitious suite of equations that has ruled the universe of high-energy physics for the last few decades, explaining how three of the four fundamental forces of nature work. But the boson itself has never been observed. The theory describes how it should work and behave but does not predict one of its key attributes, namely its mass. 
 
 Last December, two groups, which run giant particle detectors named Atlas and C.M.S. from the CERN collider, reported that they had found promising bumps in their data at masses of 124 billion electron volts and 126 billion electron volts, respectively, those being the units of mass or energy preferred by particle physicists. (By comparison, a proton is about a billion electron volts, and an electron is about half a million.) 
 
 The Fermilab physicists have found a broad hump in their data in the same region, between 115 billion and 135 billion electron volts. Those results came from combining the data from two detectors operated on the Tevatron: the Collider Detector at Fermilab, and DZero. The chances of this signal being the result of a random fluctuation in the data were only about 1 in 100, the group said. 
 
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 Dmitri Denisov, a leader of the Fermilab effort, wrote in an e-mail on the way to La Thuile, “It is clearly not the answer to crossword, but an important piece of the puzzle!” 
 
 Rumors of sightings of the Higgs boson have come and gone at both CERN and Fermilab in the last few years, but invariably where one group saw a bump, another saw a dip in the data, and with more data the bumps went away. 
 
 This is the first time in the long search for the particle that different groups, indeed different colliders, are in vague agreement. 
 
 It has led to a joke in physics circles now: The Higgs boson has not been discovered yet, but its mass is 125 billion electron volts. 
 
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 The Atlas and C.M.S. groups will be trying to combine and reconcile their data in the coming weeks. The Hadron collider, now on winter break, will start up again in April, with protons colliding at four trillion electron volts apiece. CERN has said that the collider will gather enough data this year either to confirm the existence of the Higgs boson or to rule it out forever. 
 
 Either outcome, physicists say, will be exciting. If the Higgs does not exist, they will have to come up with a new model of how the universe works. If they do find the Higgs, studying it might give them clues to deeper mysteries the Standard Model does not solve. 
 
 The Tevatron, which was the most powerful accelerator in the world for 20 years, shut down last September. ||||| More scientists are getting closer in the search for the "God particle" of physics that would help explain the fundamentals of the universe, but they haven't found it yet. 
 
 In the hunt for the Higgs boson, which is key to understanding why matter has mass, two teams of physicists using results from a now-closed American accelerator have come up with similar findings to those announced late last year by researchers at the more powerful Large Hadron Collider in Europe. While the scientists using the two accelerators have not found the elusive subatomic particle, they both have narrowed the area where it can be found, if it exists. And they know where it isn't. 
 
 Work done in the Tevatron collider at the Fermi National Lab near Chicago provides important independent confirmation of the getting-closer announcement last year by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, researchers said. The results from work by more than 800 scientists were to be announced in Italy on Wednesday. 
 
 "Globally the world is starting to see a consistent picture," said Fermi physicist Rob Roser, a spokesman for one team. "I don't think there's any place for the Higgs to hide. We'll know the answer one way or another by the end of 2012." 
 
 Roser said just because they have seen hints of the Higgs, it's not enough. "I'm not even willing to bet your house on it, let alone mine," he said Tuesday. 
 
 At Fermi, two teams independently used the accelerator in different ways. Two other teams in Europe used the Large Hadron Collider. Fermi's Tevatron collides protons and antiprotons together, while CERN smashes protons together. That means four different groups using different techniques and equipment have come to the same general conclusion. 
 
 Still, that's not certain enough for scientists to even call it evidence, Roser said. 
 
 While the results from Fermi's collider aren't as precise as CERN's, they are important because they give the European results more credence, Harvard University physicist Gary Feldman said. 
 
 The Tevatron closed in September, so it is likely that the final discovery of the Higgs will be in Europe, Roser said. 
 
 The Higgs, first hypothesized 40 years ago, is important to physics because it is crucial to the standard model theory that helps explain the six particles that make up the universe, Roser and Feldman said. Without it, there is no explanation for why the particles have mass. 
 
 "It would be a triumph of the theory to actually see that it happens," Feldman said. 
 
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 Fermilab: http://www.fnal.gov
– Particle physicists are closer than ever to confirming the existence of the Higgs boson, thanks to a report this morning from Illinois' Fermilab. Two teams of physicists that used Fermilab's now-closed Tevatron particle collider and reviewed data provided by their experiments over the last few years say they've spotted events between 115 and 135 GeV that could indicate the presence of the so-called God Particle, Wired reports. That corresponds nicely with CERN's December findings that the Higgs was somewhere between 115 and 127 GeV. Neither lab's findings amount to proof of the particle's existence. "A worldwide picture is starting to form that is making us excited at some level," said a physicist from one of the two experiments. "We see some tantalizing evidence but not significant enough to make a stronger statement." The signal could just be a random data fluctuation, though scientists pegged the odds of that at just one in 100, according to the New York Times. A Fermilab physicist tells the AP that because the Tevatron closed in September, the final discovery of the Higgs will likely happen in Europe.