Higgs discovery rumours denied

Rumours that evidence about the elusive Higgs Boson had been discovered at Fermilab are unfounded, according to a Fermilab spokesperson.

"There is no factual basis for this [rumour]," Fermilab director of communications Judy Jackson told ZDNet UK on Wednesday.

The rumours about experiments using the Tevatron particle accelerator were kicked off by a blog post by physicist Tommaso Dorigo last week.

"It reached my ear, from two different, possibly independent sources, that an experiment at the Tevatron is about to release some evidence of a light Higgs boson signal," said Dorigo "Some say a three-sigma effect, others do not make explicit claims but talk of a unexpected result."

Jackson said that Fermilab was due to present results from experiments at its Tevatron particle accelerator at the International Conference on High Energy Physics conference in Paris, which runs from 22 to 28 July. However, no results relating to the Higgs boson were due to be presented.

The Higgs boson, also known as the 'God particle', is the last particle predicted by the Standard Model of physics which has yet to be observed. The theoretical elementary scalar particle is thought to mediate mass.