CERN will present an update on its Higgs boson search in July

BOFFINS at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) will hold a press conference on 4 July to provide an update on its search for the Higgs boson.

CERN's 2012 Large Hadron Collider operations concluded on 18 June with the organisation claiming that it has managed to collect more data between April 2012 and June 2012 than in the whole of 2011. Now CERN has penciled in 4 July to present an update in its search for the Higgs boson.

While CERN's ATLAS and CMS experiments have a lot more data to analyse, even if a new particle is found researchers will need time to determine whether it is the Higgs boson. CERN director general Rolf Heuer said, "It's a bit like spotting a familiar face from afar, sometimes you need closer inspection to find out whether it's really your best friend, or actually your best friend's twin."

CERN has been slowly narrowing down the 'range' in which it expects to detect the Higgs boson, however the elusive quantum physics particle has stumped researchers at both CERN and Fermilab for a number of years. The Higgs boson has, perhaps somewhat ironically, been called the 'God particle', however more accurately it is the last 'missing' particle needed to complete the standard model of particle physics.

CERN will present its update at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Melbourne, Australia. µ