At FermiLab, end of Search for 'God Particle' Nears

A twenty-five year search for one of the keys to understanding the structure of the universe is coming to an end at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermilab in suburban Chicago. The Tevatron Accelerator, a sub-atomic particle collider,rift gold is scheduled to go offline later this year. When that happens, the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, in Geneva, Switzerland, will fully take over the search for the so-called "God Particle." But, the Tevatron is not going quietly into retirement.

For more than 15 years, scientist Robert Roser has searched for the elusive "Higgs Boson."

"The Higgs Boson is a hypothetical particle that we believe exists to fix a flaw in the standard mode," said Robert Roser. "The standard model, to us, is our mathematical description of how the universe works. The significant flaw in that model is that it doesn’t explain mass."

The discovery of the Higgs Boson - known to many as the "God Particle" - could give scientists the answers they seek to many of the biggest questions known to man.

"We’re asking the question of how the universe works, and why is it built the way it is built?"

To find the Higgs Boson at Fermilab, scientists use the Tevatron Accelerator to slam protons and anti-protons together. In the stream of data that follows, scientists look for clues that the Higgs Boson exists. So far, they haven’t found any such clues. But Roser says they may have found something else.

"As we look at these huge data sets that we’ve acquired over the 10 years, we’re now putting out things that we’ve learned about that data," he said. "And so what you’re seeing here is evidence for perhaps a new particle rift gold and there will be other things that will come out over the coming months that will be just as interesting as this."

The discovery of what could be a previously unknown sub-atomic particle could also be the last major accomplishment of the Tevatron.