""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. ""
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. ""
Journalists Are Being Told to Wait for the
Briefing After Next Week's Scientific Meeting:
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