PARIS: One of the greatest prizes in modern physics — the confirmation or otherwise of a theoretical sub-atomic particle called the Higgs boson — is back up for grabs.

In a friendly but intense rivalry, European and US scientists have been going head-to-head to find the particle that will either confirm or wreck our concept of the physical universe.

In 2000, scientists at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland came, they believed, within a hair’s-breadth of spotting the Higgs before their atom-smasher had to be scrapped to make way for a more powerful machine, due to be finished in 2007.

That threw a vital chance to CERN’s rivals at Fermilab’s Tevetron particle accelerator in Batavia, Illinois.

But, says the British weekly New Scientist, the Tevatron itself is running into big problems.

It is finding it technically tricky to muster the high-energy beams that smash protons and antiprotons together to see if Higgses tumble out of the rubble, New Scientist reports in next Saturday’s issue.

The collider, 20 years old, is also feeling its age, and there are long periods of maintenance and repair between experiments.

A schedule of the Tevatron’s activities, handed last week to the US Department of Energy, which provides funding for the collider, says the earliest date for concrete proof for finding or disproving a Higgs at the most-touted energy range will be 2009 at the earliest, the article says.—AFP