[Phenomenon]

Physicists have moved to quash rumours that the elusive Higgs boson - dubbed the God particle - has been detected by a US "atom smasher". A spokesman for the lab which operated the Tevatron accelerator denied scientists had made a discovery there. The Tevatron, based at Fermilab in Illinois, is the US rival to Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The rumours were made public in a blog post by an Italian particle physicist. But a spokesman for the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) told BBC News: "There is no merit to the rumours of a Higgs discovery." On Tuesday, Fermilab's Twitter feed said: "Let's settle this: the rumours spread by one fame-seeking blogger are just rumours. That's it." Stefan Soldner-Rembold, a spokesperson for the DZero experiment, which is based at Fermilab, told BBC News: "There is no evidence yet of a Standard Model Higgs signal; more data will be needed for that.

View: Full Article | Source: BBC News

Image Credit: United States Department of Energy/U.S. Federal Government