Heartbreaker: Major Setback in Quest for 'God Particle'

physicists say. The strange anomaly that led to the God Particle chatter was nothing like what physicists expected from the Higgs in the first place.

"I had known from the start. It could not be a Higgs, and it can't be anything else either," Tommaso Dorigo, an experimental particle physicist who works with both atom smashers, told FoxNews.com. Denisov agreed.

"It was never the way the Higgs boson was supposed decay. It was something completely different. It wasn't even obtained by the group that was hunting for the Higgs!" he said.

So what was it, anyway? Something completely unknown and unexpected, Denisov said, which is what prompted Fermilab to drop everything and assign its top scientists to uncover an unfortunate truth: Someone forgot to carry a zero.

"Probably the way they are estimating standard model backgrounds is not correct," he said. One minor mistake and the tantalizing signal disappears, in other words. "My suspicion is that one way or the other, they're not modeling the standard background correctly."

Despite the disappointing setback, the quest for the Higgs boson is nonetheless drawing to a close.

"I'm pretty confident that towards the end of 2012 we will have an answer to the Shakespeare question for the Higgs boson, to be, or not to be?" Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director general of CERN, said at Britain's Royal Society.

Denisov agrees that the next few months could be eye-opening. And for Fermilab and the Tevatron, which is scheduled to be shut down this summer, it has to be.

"We are planning to finish our data taking later this year, and Tevatron will be shut down," he said. "It will either be seen at Tevatron in completely different decay models or at LHC or not at all."

Fermilab closing its doors probably won't end the Higgs hunt; the LHC is a more likely site for the discovery anyway, being newer, bigger, and ultimately better. And even Denisov was willing to admit that.

"It's like a Ford Model T trying to compete with a Ferrari," he joked.

via foxnews.com