Hunt for the Higgs Particle Resumes. (April 13, 2012)

On April 5 CERNS Large Hadron Collider (LHC) resumed operation after its scheduled annual winter shutdown. It also boasts a slightly increased energy level. It is expected that with the collection of about three times the amount of data that was collected last year, analyses using two of its particle detectors, ATLAS and CMS, will allow a definitive determination as to the existence, or otherwise, of the Higgs boson.

Bruce Mellado, a member of the ATLAS team from the University of Wisconsin, Madison told Science: "I would imagine that some time this [northern] summer, when we have collected as much data as we got last year, we'll get a hint of which way it will go. Either we'll confirm the excesses [which hinted at the existence of the Higgs] we saw in 2011 or we won't."