Hunt for physics' holy grail

 

The US$10 billion ($12.58 billion) particle accelerator has operated for a year, generating billions of pieces of data in the hunt for the Higgs boson, nature's building block. But it hasn't been found and scientists are running out of places to look.

For almost 20 years, Bill Murray has been hunting for the elusive subatomic particle that is thought to give mass to the basic building blocks of nature.

In those two decades, the 45-year-old Edinburgh-born researcher has watched the search for the holy grail of physics narrow to a tight group of targets - a process of elimination that has peaked over the past 12 months with the start-up of the Large Hadron Collider at Cern, the European particle physics laboratory.

An avalanche of nuclear collisions - created by beams of high-energy protons smashing together - have been generated. But no trace of the Higgs - the so-called "God particle" - has been found in the resulting nuclear debris.

Only a very narrow range of Higgs targets are now left - and some scientists are beginning to get twitchy, including Murray.   More Read