Last December, with the Internet having been awash with rumours for weeks, saw the official announcement of the latest results in the search for the Higgs particle from the fellowship of the ring – the physicists working at CERN’s 27km circular Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The Higgs is the missing piece of the theory that describes the behaviour of fundamental particles and the forces that act between them. It plays a special role in giving all the other particles mass. 

The teams running the two giant detectors at the LHC independently put the mass of the Higgs, which is measured in what physicists call gigaelectron volts (GeV), somewhere between 116–130 and 115–127 GeV respectively. Although the scope of the search for the Higgs has now been narrowed, particle physicists demand