'God particle' rumour quelled

Rumoured evidence of the so-called "God particle" has been heavily downplayed by a spokeswoman for the Large Hadron Collider.

"Only results that have undergone all the necessary scientific checks by the [ATLAS] Collaboration should be taken seriously," Fabiola Gianotti, spokeswoman for the collaboration, told a blog run by the scientific journal Nature Monday in response to questions about the possible discovery of the Higgs boson, popularly known as the "God particle."

The rumour originated from an internal memo from four researchers atATLAS, one of severalinternational collaborations of researchersat the LHC, the world's largest and most powerful particleaccelerator, located near Geneva,Switzerland.

The document was posted April 21 on the science blog "Not Even Wrong," which belongs to Peter Woit, a mathematician at Columbia University in New York.

The memo reported a signal that could be caused by the decay of the much sought-after Higgs particle. The posting led to a flurry of comments and speculation both on the blog and across the internet.

However, Gianotti said signals like the one reported in the memo show up frequently during data analysis.Typically, further scrutiny shows them to be false, she added.

The Higgs boson is supposed to impart mass to other particles and is seen as the last piece of the puzzle to prove the Standard Model of particle physics.

The Standard Model with its familiar particles like electrons and photons, and less intuitive particles like muons and Higgs bosons has proved accurate in experiments, but there are gaps in the theory that the Higgs boson would fill, if it existed.

Huntingfor the Higgs boson is one of the main goals of the $10-billionLHC, which features a ring 27 kilometres in diameter and began operation in 2008.