If so, this will be a significant milestone for teams at the famous Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
The particle-accelerating machine on the French-Swiss border was built with the hunt for the Higgs as a key goal.
The collider smashes beams of protons together in head-on collisions, with signs of the Higgs boson, perhaps, in the debris.
The Higgs boson is notoriously difficult to define, but its existence helps us to understand why particles have mass.
The search for the Higgs has become the hottest pursuit in modern physics. It is separate from the unexpected announcement in September of the apparently faster-than-light neutrinos, a result which is still puzzling the world of physics, and has taken the limelight recently.
Different types of particles are thought to have different masses because they interact with the Higgs field with varying strengths. But if there is an extra dimension of space, particles can have higher-energy modes that show up only in the extra dimension. In ordinary particle physics, particles have a baseline energy called the ground state and can have more energetic "excited" states above that. Because energy is linked to mass through E=mc2, the excited states weigh slightly more than the ground state.
In a world with four spatial dimensions, particles have a full range of excited states, but most of their energy is trapped in the extra dimension, where we can't see it. The unseen states of a single type of particle end up looking like different particles to us in our 3D world. You still need a Higgs-like field to give the ground state mass, but an extra dimension can explain why we see particles of different masses without invoking the usual Higgs boson.
"This would be a way of discriminating between particles and giving them different masses, which doesn't make any reference to any Higgs boson or anything at all," says CERN theorist John Ellis.
Why take these alternative ideas seriously?
"It's the job of theoretical physicists to game out all the different possibilities, so that the experimentalists have all the tools that they need when they eventually discover or don't discover whatever it is the LHC will or will not reveal," says Ellis.
Whatever the LHC finds, the prospect of getting such a flood of data is thrilling, says Tonelli. "This is the atmosphere here. People are feeling that we are really touching something important."
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