The Higgs boson hints announced in December came from two different experiments. The detector for one of them, ATLAS, which involves Canadian scientists, is shown above. The Higgs boson hints announced in December came from two different experiments. The detector for one of them, ATLAS, which involves Canadian scientists, is shown above. (ATLAS/CERN)

The world's largest particle accelerator is ramping up its beam energy in hopes that scientists will learn definitively this year whether the last undiscovered particle in the Standard Model of Physics exists.

Scientists from two experiments running at the Large Hadron Collider announced in December that they saw "tantalizing hints" of the Higgs boson — nicknamed the "god particle" by 1988 Nobel Prize winner Leon Lederman — an elusive subatomic particle theorized to impart mass to other particles.

The Higgs boson and the Standard Model

The Higgs boson is a subatomic particle that plays a key role in the Standard Model of physics that describes the understanding of all elementary particles and how they interact.

The Standard Model of Physics includes common particles like electrons and photons along with less familiar ones like muons. Among them, the Higgs boson is the only one that remains undetected in experiments. However, it is extremely important because it allows particles to have mass.

The Higgs boson and its mechanism for imparting mass to other particles were first proposed by British physicist Peter Higgs 40 years ago.

The Large Hadron Collider is expected to help scientists find the Higgs boson, if it exists, because it allows them to observe extremely high energy collisions similar to those during the Big Bang. Those could in turn produce the previously undetected particle.

If a Higgs boson that behaves according to the Standard Model exists, Higgs's theory would be confirmed. However, if the Higgs boson doesn't behave according to predictions or is not detected at all, that would open the door to completely new physics outside the Standard Model and our current understanding of nature.

However, that was based on a small number of signals, and scientists said they need to collect more data to make statistically sure that the "hints" they saw were not due to fluctuations in background signals caused by other particles and processes.

Increasing the beam energy of the Large Hadron Collider to four tera electron volts will allow it to collect three times as much data in 2012 than in 2011, when the beam was running at 3.5 TeV, said CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in a news release Monday.

That would drastically boost the ratio of the signals scientists are looking for compared to "background" signals.

"By the time the LHC goes into its first long stop at the end of this year, we will either know that a Higgs particle exists or have ruled out the existence of a Standard Model Higgs,” said CERN’s research director, Sergio Bertolucci in a statement.

"Either would be a major advance in our exploration of nature, bringing us closer to understanding how the fundamental particles acquire their mass, and marking the beginning of a new chapter in particle physics."

The LHC was previously set at a lower beam energy to ensure it could run safely in the range where scientists were looking for the Higgs boson. However, two years at that energy "give us the confidence to safely move up a notch," CERN's director of accelerators and technology, Steve Myers, said in a statement.

The beams will begin running at their higher energy next month and the experiments will continue collecting data until November. At that point, the collider is scheduled to shut down for 20 months so it can be ramped up to the maximum power it was designed for — 7 TeV per beam.