Higgs boson hunt aided by energy boost

The world's largest particle accelerator is ramping up its beam energy in hopesthat scientists will learn definitively this year whether the last undiscovered particle in the Standard Model of Physics exists.

Scientists from two experiments running at the Large Hadron Collider announced in December that they saw "tantalizing hints" of the Higgs boson nicknamed the "god particle" by 1988 Nobel Prize winner Leon Lederman an elusive subatomic particle theorized to impart mass to other particles.

However, that was based on a small number of signals, and scientists said they need to collect more data to make statistically sure that the "hints" they saw were not due to fluctuations in background signals caused by other particles and processes.

Increasing the beam energy of the Large Hadron Collider to four tera electron volts will allow it to collect three times as much data in 2012 than in 2011, when the beam was running at 3.5 TeV, said CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in a news release Monday.

That would drastically boost the ratio of the signals scientists are looking for compared to "background" signals.

"By the time the LHC goes into its first long stop at the end of this year, we will either know that a Higgs particle exists or haveruled out the existence of a Standard Model Higgs," said CERNs research director, Sergio Bertolucci in a statement.

"Either would be a major advance in our exploration of nature, bringing us closer to understanding how the fundamental particles acquire their mass, and marking the beginning of a new chapter in particle physics."

The LHC was previously set at a lower beam energy to ensure it could run safely in the range where scientists were looking for the Higgs boson. However, two years at that energy "give us the confidence to safely move up a notch," CERN's director of accelerators and technology, Steve Myers, said in a statement.

The beams will begin running at their higher energy next month and the experiments will continue collecting data until November. At that point, the collider is scheduled to shut down for 20 months so it can be ramped up to the maximum power it was designed for7 TeV per beam.