Image caption The search for the Higgs boson could be approaching its conclusion at Cern 
 
 A respected scientist from the Cern particle physics laboratory has told the BBC he expects to see "the first glimpse" of the Higgs boson next week. 
 
 It comes as the search for the mysterious fundamental particle reaches its endgame. 
 
 If so, this will be a significant milestone for teams at the famous Large Hadron Collider (LHC). 
 
 The particle-accelerating machine on the French-Swiss border was built with the hunt for the Higgs as a key goal. 
 
 The collider smashes beams of protons together in head-on collisions, with signs of the Higgs boson, perhaps, in the debris. 
 
 The Higgs boson is notoriously difficult to define, but its existence helps us to understand why particles have mass. 
 
 The search for the Higgs has become the hottest pursuit in modern physics. It is separate from the unexpected announcement in September of the apparently faster-than-light neutrinos, a result which is still puzzling the world of physics, and has taken the limelight recently. 
 
 'Growing sense of excitement' 
 
 Next Tuesday, two separate teams will each reveal the outcome of trawling through their latest data from LHC collisions. A spokesman for one of these teams told us that this year alone they've searched the remains of some 350 trillion collisions, with only ten or so producing candidates for a reliable sign of the Higgs. 
 
 The two teams of scientists work independently, using two separate detectors - called ATLAS and CMS - each relying on different technologies. This way they provide an independent cross-check for each other. How closely their results agree will be an important measure of how significant a finding they can claim. 
 
 The teams are sworn to secrecy, but various physics blogs, and the canteens at Cern, are alive with talk of a possible sighting of the Higgs, and with a mass inline with what many physicists would expect. 
 
 The teams have been focussing-in on the Higgs by ruling out energy ranges where it might be lurking. They now expect to see it at around 120 to 125 GeV (gigelectronvolts), where one GeV is about the mass of a proton. 
 
 Professor John Ellis, a former head of theoretical physics at Cern, told Newsnight's science editor Susan Watts about the growing sense of excitement at Cern, a week ahead of that key science meeting next Tuesday. 
 
 "I think we are going to get the first glimpse. The LHC experiments have already looked high and low for this missing piece. It could be that it weighs several hundred times the proton mass, but that seems very unlikely, then there's a whole intermediate range where we know it cannot be, then there's the low mass range where we actually expect it might be. There seem to be some hints emerging there... and that's what we're going to learn on Tuesday". 
 
 Professor Ellis, who is now a guest professor at Cern, and was recently made James Clerk Maxwell professor at King's College, London, told Newsnight that finding the Higgs matters hugely to modern physics. 
 
 "What we have at the moment is something we call the Standard Model, that describes all fundamental particle physics. You can think of it as being an enormous giant Jigsaw puzzle, but there's a piece missing right in the middle there. We have been looking for this for 30 years now, and finally, maybe, hidden under the back of the LHC sofa…we are finally finding it". 
 
 The teams at Cern will not claim next week's result as an official "discovery" - a so-called 5-sigma event. This is because they have not yet produced enough experimental data to make that claim. That will come next year, probably by the summer. 
 
 Journalists are being told to wait for the briefing after next week's scientific meeting, but researchers whom Susan Watts spoke to in the coffee shops of Cern were finding it hard to keep the smiles from their faces. 
 
 Understandably perhaps, the director of research at Cern, Sergio Bertolucci, is being more cautious than Professor Ellis. He told me, somewhat enigmatically: "It's too early to say…I think we may get indications that are not consistent with its non-existence." He expects next Tuesday's results to amount to less than the formal definition of "evidence", but said the statistics will be "very interesting". 
 
 "I would be very inclined to say just that we will not give anything except an update which will tell people we are on a good path to the discovery." 
 
 Mr Bertolucci told Newsnight: "This hunt for the Higgs is like fishing in an ancient way… instead of using modern tools you are removing the water from the pond… it might look tedious but it is the only way, at the end of the day, when you have removed all the water from the pond to find the smallest fish." ||||| Soon after Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director general at Cern, emailed staff about next Tuesday's seminar on the most sought-after particle in modern times, rumours hit the physics blogs that the lab might finally have caught sight of the Higgs boson. 
 
 I wrote last week that the heads of the two groups that work on the Atlas and CMS detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will give the talks. That in itself is telling – usually more junior researchers present updates on the search for the missing particle. 
 
 Last month, scientists at the lab said that if the particle exists, it was most likely to have a mass somewhere between 114 and 141GeV (gigaelectronvolts), where one GeV is roughly equivalent to the mass of a proton, a subatomic particle found in atomic nuclei. 
 
 A couple of blogs, including viXra and Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong, have now posted rumours that the Atlas and CMS teams see Higgs-like signals around 125GeV, though they say the evidence is not robust enough to claim an official discovery. 
 
 If the rumours are right and precede a discovery, it means the Higgs boson weighs as much as two copper atoms. That fits quite well with a theory called supersymmetry, which gives physicists a way to unify the four known forces of nature, a feat that frustrated Einstein to the grave. 
 
 But enough of the rumours. When the seminar was announced – and before the rumours surfaced – I asked some physicists to share, in a couple of simple sentences, their hunches on what gives mass to fundamental particles. Is it the simplest version of the Higgs mechanism, which gives us what is called the Standard Model Higgs boson? Is it a more complex kind of Higgs field? Or something else entirely? I hoped the replies would give a flavour of the range of views they hold. 
 
 Most got back to me. A few kept their replies to a couple of sentences. Some included technical language, and perhaps that was inevitable. One Nobel prizewinner said the Higgs boson doesn't exist. Another responded with a limerick. 
 
 Before I list the replies, here is some background. The Higgs mechanism describes an invisible field that, it is argued, split one force into two soon after the birth of the universe. Specifically, it divided an ancient "electroweak" force into the electromagnetic and weak forces we see at work today. The latter is seen in some radioactive decay processes, and is involved in creating sunshine. 
 
 The Higgs field splits the electroweak force by giving mass to the particles that carry the weak force (the W & Z bosons) and leaving the particle that carries the electromagnetic force (the photon) massless. The Higgs boson is the quantum particle associated with the Higgs field. 
 
 The simplest version of the Higgs boson is described by the Standard Model, a group of equations that explain how known particles interact with each other. There are plenty more complex versions though. Some of these could take ten years to rule out, according to Matt Strassler, a physicist at Rutgers University in New Jersey. 
 
 One more point. The Higgs field, if real, is responsible for only a tiny proportion of mass. Around 98% of mass of everyday objects comes from the energy stored up in the particles that make atomic nuclei, i.e. quarks that are bound together by gluons inside protons and neutrons. The Higgs field is thought to give mass to quarks and electrons, but that makes up only one or two percent of an object's mass. Let's say I weigh 80kg. That means less than a kilo comes from the Higgs field. 
 
 Here are the physicists' responses, in no particular order: 
 
 "They said when the collider goes on 
 
 Soon they'd see that elusive boson 
 
 Very soon we shall hear 
 
 Whether Cern finds it this year 
 
 But it's something I won't bet very much on." 
 
 "The Higgs mechanism for generating masses is extremely attractive and has no real competition. Beyond that there's little certainty. A near-minimal implementation of supersymmetry, perhaps augmented with ultra-weakly interacting particles, is the prettiest possibility. So I'd like several Higgs particles, Higgsinos, some ghostly stuff, and a pony." 
 
 [Note: A Higgsino is a supersymmetric partner of a Higgs boson]. 
 
 "It is difficult to think of alternatives that are consistent theoretically and with everything observed to date that don't involve the Higgs mechanism – the process of essentially distributing a 'charge' throughout the vacuum. Elementary particles interact with this 'charge' and acquire mass. It is not necessarily clear, however, what is responsible for that charge in the first place and that is what determines what experiments will see. 
 
 "I still think the most likely answer is a conventional light Higgs boson. But when asked what I thought the odds were in a popular lecture, I surprised myself by saying 70%. I've even bet chocolate based on those odds. If not true, I think a heavier composite Higgs boson made up of more fundamental components might be the answer." 
 
 John Terning, University of California, Davis 
 
 "We know that strong interactions of quarks and gluons provide the bulk of the proton's mass; I suspect that there are some new – very strongly interacting – particles that provide the masses for the fundamental particles. The most spectacular possibility is that these new particles are the magnetic monopoles that Paul Dirac predicted." 
 
 "You are mistaken about the Higgs search at Cern. The machine runs at half energy so far, and no one expects relevant (for the Higgs particle) results. After the shutdown [in 2013] the machine will gradually go up in energy, and if all goes well (this is non-trivial) then in about half a year the machine energy might reach design value and there might be Higgs-relevant results. So if you are thinking next week then you are mistaken. Of course, we never know what surprises nature has in store for us … It is my opinion that there is no Higgs." 
 
 "I doubt if the opinions of one who thinks about these problems perhaps every 30 years or so will carry much weight. I've been busy. But the last time I thought, I realised a) that the Higgs(-A) mechanism fits the facts too beautifully not to be true, but b) it must be incomplete, because there's no proper accounting of the vacuum energy." 
 
 [Note: Anderson essentially described the Higgs mechanism in 1962, two years before Higgs and five other physicists published the theory.] 
 
 David Kaplan, University of Washington, Seattle 
 
 "I expect some variant of the Standard Model is correct, such as a two-Higgs doublet theory, although later one could well discover the Higgs bosons to be composite particles. Discovery of neutrino masses has opened a window onto physics beyond the Standard Model, and discovery of the mass-generation mechanism for quarks and leptons will open it wider." 
 
 [Note: the two Higgs doublet model calls for five Higgs bosons] 
 
 David Curtin, Stony Brook University 
 
 "It could be the Standard Model Higgs, but I sincerely hope not. Only data will reveal what nature chose, but two of my favourite alternatives are extra dimensions and supersymmetry – their discovery would tell us incredibly exciting things about several fundamental questions, including (but not limited to) the nature of space-time itself." 
 
 "The whole idea that something should give mass to the fundamental particles is a hype that resulted from over-commercialisation of the Higgs theory, which actually might backfire on us. Fact is that in our present theoretical descriptions, most of the mass terms in the equations for the fundamental particles appear to violate an important symmetry (chiral symmetry) unless they can be connected to an additional field, the Higgs field, which would also require the existence of a not yet discovered particle, the Higgs particle … 
 
 "However, since chiral symmetry is unavoidable for the inner consistency of our description of the fundamental particles, the beautiful theoretical prediction of a Standard Model Higgs particle still stands out, and I still consider the near discovery of such a particle very likely. Alternative descriptions, such as many Higgs particles, each of which are more difficult to detect, or some altogether different mechanism, are much less attractive theoretically. As we know from the history of science, this argument does not suffice to rule out the existence of such alternatives, but I consider them much less probable." 
 
 David Miller, University of Glasgow 
 
 "Technicolor models use a new force of nature to generate particle masses. This new force is very strong, confining particles in bound states, and the binding energy gives the mass of the state. This is directly analogous to the generation of mass for the proton by the strong nuclear force." 
 
 Ian Sample is the Guardian's science correspondent and author of Massive: The missing particle that sparked the greatest hunt in science
– The Higgs boson "God particle" may or may not exist, and physicists at the Large Hadron Collider may or may not be close to spotting it, but one thing is clear: There are some very excited scientists at CERN. Rumors that the elusive particle believed to endow matter with mass has been spotted have circulated before, but experts believe confirmation of its existence may finally be unveiled at the European research lab next week, when teams that have trawled data from 350 trillion collisions release their results, the Guardian reports. The teams have been gradually narrowing the energy range where the Higgs may lurk, and expect to see the first glimpse within days, a top CERN scientist tells the BBC. CERN's director of research is more cautious, saying only that "indications that are not consistent with its non-existence" may surface. "This hunt for the Higgs is like fishing in an ancient way," he says. "Instead of using modern tools you are removing the water from the pond. It might look tedious but it is the only way, at the end of the day, when you have removed all the water from the pond to find the smallest fish."