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“What’s really important for the Higgs is that it explains how the world could be the way that it is in the first millionth of a second in the Big Bang,” de Roeck said.

“Can we apply it to something? At this moment my imagination is too small to do that.”

Physicist Ray Volkas said “almost everybody” was hoping that, rather than fitting the so-called Standard Model of physics — a theory explaining how particles fit together in the Universe — the Higgs boson would prove to be “something a bit different.”

“If that was the case that would point to all sorts of new physics — physics that might have something to do with dark matter,” he said, referring to the hypothetical invisible matter thought to make up much of the universe.

“It could be, for example, that the Higgs particle acts as a bridge between ordinary matter, which makes up atoms, and dark matter, which we know is a very important component of the universe.”

“That would have really fantastic implications for understanding all of the matter in the universe, not just ordinary atoms,” he added.

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De Roeck said scrutinizing the new particle and determining whether it supported something other than the Standard Model would be the next step for CERN scientists.

Clarification could be expected by the beginning of 2013. Definitive proof that it fitted the Standard Model could take until 2015 when the LHC had more power and could harvest more data.

The LHC is due to go offline for a two-year refit in December that will see its firepower doubled to 14 trillion electronvolts — a huge step forward in the search for new particles and clues about what holds them all together.