Long-Sought 'God Particle' Cornered, Scientists Say

A typical candidate event at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), including two high-energy photons whose energy (depicted by red towers) is measured in the CMS electromagnetic calorimeter. The yellow lines are the measured tracks of other particles produced in the collision. The pale blue volume shows the CMS crystal calorimeter barrel. CREDIT: CERN/COMS View full size image

Physicists are closer than ever to hunting down the elusive Higgs boson particle, the missing piece of the governing theory of the universe's tiniest building blocks.

Scientists at the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, announced today (Dec. 13) that they'd narrowed down the list of possible hiding spots for the Higgs, (also called the God particle) and even see some indications that they're hot on its trail.

"I think we are getting very close," said Vivek Sharma, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego, and the leader of the Higgs search at LHC's CMS experiment. "We may be getting the first tantalizing hints, but it's a whiff, it's a smell, it's not quite the whole thing."

Today's announcement was highly anticipated by both the physics community and the public, with speculation running rampant in the days leading up to it that the elusive particle may have finally been found. Though the news is not the final answer some were hoping for, the progress is a significant, exciting step, physicists say. [Top 5 Implications of Finding the Higgs Boson]