Bill Murray is a man with secrets. Along with a handful of other scientists based at CERN, Europe's particle-physics facility near Geneva, Switzerland, Murray is one of the few researchers with access to the latest data on the Higgs boson - the most sought-after particle in physics. Looking at his laptop, he traces a thin black line that wiggles across a shaded area at the centre of a graph. This is the fruit of his summer's labours. "Its interesting, actually, looking at this again," he muses. A tantalizing pause. "But no, I can't say..." Despite Murray's coyness, there are few places left for the Higgs to hide. Billed as the particle that helps to confer mass on other matter, and the final missing piece in the 'standard model' of particle physics, the Higgs would be a huge prize for CERN s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the worlds most powerful particle accelerator. But so far, the two massive detectors there -ATLAS, where Murray works, and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) - have not seen any convincing signals of the elusive particle.
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