DAVOS, Switzerland -- The world should know with certainty by the middle of this year whether a subatomic particle discovered last summer is a Higgs boson long sought by physicists, the head of the world's largest atom smasher said Saturday.

Rolf Heuer, who is the director of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, said he is confident that "towards the middle of the year, we will be there." By then, he said reams of data from the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss-French border near Geneva, should have been assessed.


CERN's atom smasher helped scientists declare last July their discovery of a new subatomic particle that Heuer calls "very, very like" a Higgs boson, that promises a new realm of understanding the universe.


"Suppose the Higgs Boson is a special snowflake, so you have to identify the snowflake, in a big snowstorm, in front of a background of snowfields," Heuer said by way of analogy. "That is very difficult, you need a tremendous amount of snowfall in order to identify the snowflakes and this is why it takes time."

He said the standard model of particle physics describes only 5 per cent of the universe, which many theorize occurred in a massive explosion known as the Big Bang.




"Now, if there is a deviation in one of the properties of this Higgs boson, that means we open a new window, for example, hopefully into the part of the dark universe, the 95 per cent of the unknown universe," said Heuer.

"If you find the deviation," he added, "that means if it is not the -- but a -- Higgs boson, then we might find a fantastic window into the dark universe so we would make another giant leap from the visible to the dark."