CERN ready to lift the lid on latest LHC findings

Worldwide Computer Grid helping hunt for elusive Higgs Boson

European boffin hothouse CERN will reveal the latest findings in its search for the Higgs Boson, the illusive particle which is theorised to give all matter its mass.

CERN will unveil its latest findings - from its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) atom smasher, which has collected twice the amount of data produced in the previous year, on 4 July in Australia.

"We now have more than double the data we had last year," said CERN director for Research and Computing, Sergio Bertolucci.

"That should be enough to see whether the trends we were seeing in the 2011 data are still there, or whether they've gone away. It's a very exciting time."

Previously, Cern had reported that its LHC experiments had detected hints of Higgs existence in its data - though there was not enough data to be certain. The latest set of results should provide more insight.

The scientists at CERN have used previous results to tweak their latest experiments, providing significantly more data to look through. The analysis of that data has been done by the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, which CERN claimed has now exceeded its design specification, handling unprecedented volumes of data.

Confirmation of Higgs' existence would provide the missing piece for the so-called standard model of physics. The subatomic particles predicted under this model are believed to derive mass from how strongly they interact with the Higgs.

That is a huge deal for particle physicists, as it would confirm their understanding of the matter that makes up the visible universe and the forces that govern its behaviour.

Sadly though, the visible universe is only believed to account for about four per cent of what appears to be out beyond our solar system - there's still an enormous amount of dark matter and dark energy that physicists can't yet account for.

The latest results from the LHC are being presented ahead of the annual International Conference for High Energy Physics, which will take place in Melbourne, Australia.