Scientists are eagerly anticipating the report to be made public Tuesday on data from two main experiments using the Large Hadron Collider, that will finally resolve questions on whether or not the Higgs boson or "God particle" exists.

Two teams of scientists used two separate detectors, called ATLAS and CMS, and each team will each reveal the outcome of their experiment based on latest data from LHC collisions.

Although CERN officials had said that there would be no discovery announcement, scientists believe that even a confirmation that something like the long-sought Higgs boson had been discovered would lead the way to major advances in knowledge of the universe.

"I am feeling quite a level of excitement," Oliver Buchmueller, a senior member of ATLAS, one of the two teams seeking the particle amid vast volumes of data gathered in CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
According to Buchmueller, if the ATLAS group had found signals similar to those seen in CMS, "then we're moving very close to a conclusion in the first few months of next year."

Finding the Higgs boson would be an enormous scientific breakthrough, as it would explain why different particles have different masses, and eventually explain the origins of the universe.

"The anticipation among physics enthusiasts is almost palpable," said theoretician Sascha Vongehr.

The Higgs boson was posited in 1964 by British physicist Peter Higgs as the agent that gave mass to matter in the wake of the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. If its existence is confirmed, would open the way to what CERN calls the "New Physics" of super-symmetry and dark matter.