International scientists hoping to capture the elusive Higgs Boson particle, supposed to have played a vital role in the creation of the universe, said Monday it might not exist after all.

A month ago, scientists from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) research center, using the center's Large Hadron Collider, said they were close to identifying the Higgs Boson particle that gave objects mass and energy during the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. The so-called "god particle" would have solved the mystery of the beginning of the cosmos and represents the final piece of the standard model of physics.

"At this moment we don't see any evidence for the Higgs in the lower mass region where it is likely to be," physicist Howard Gordon, deputy operations program manager at ATLAS, the biggest particle collider lab at the collider, told AFP.

"I think it is true that the hints that we saw in July are not as significant -- they weren't very significant in July -- but they have gotten less significant now," Gordon said.

Physicists still aren't ready to rule out the possibility of the Higgs Boson's existence and said the quest for the mysterious particle, even if unsuccessful, will still open new possibilities for physicists.

"Whatever the final verdict on Higgs, we are now living in very exciting times for all involved in the quest for new physics," says CERN researcher Professor Guido Tonelli.

New results from CERN show that scientists haven't found the particle and if it exists it is running out of places to hide. The LHC, which began operating in March 2010, recreates the Big Bang by smashing particles together at the just a fraction under the speed of light.

Scientists have been analyzing the results of these collisions and have been unable to find evidence of the particle that explains how matter got its mass.

"Discoveries are almost assured within the next 12 months. If the Higgs exists, the LHC experiments will soon find it. If it does not, its absence will point the way to new physics," said Bertolucci.