BATAVIA – Fermilab officials Wednesday announced they have found hints of the elusive Higgs boson, which is believed to give mass to matter that makes up the universe.



“We see evidence for an object consistent with that of the Higgs boson,” Fermilab scientist Rob Roser said. “We have hints that looks like there is a Higgs boson out there.”



Scientists from the CDF and DZero collaborations at Fermilab analyzed the data collected before the September shutdown of the Tevatron accelerator in the search for the Higgs boson.



Physicists from the CDF and DZero collaborations found excesses in their data that might be interpreted as coming from a Higgs boson with a mass in the region of 115 to 135 GeV.



GeV stands for giga-electronvolt, a unit of energy equal to a billion electron volts. In this range, the new result has a probability of being because of a statistical fluctuation at level of significance known among scientists as 2.2 sigma. This new result also excludes the possibility of the Higgs having a mass in the range from 147 to 179 GeV, Fermilab officials said.



Physicists claim evidence of a new particle only if the probability that the data could be because of a statistical fluctuation that is less than 1 in 740, or three sigmas. A discovery is claimed only if that probability is less than 1 in 3.5 million, or five sigmas.



At one time, Fermilab had the world’s largest atom smasher. But in 2009, the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland broke the world record for proton acceleration, firing particle beams with 20 percent more power than Fermilab’s Tevatron, which previously held the record.



Roser believes the Large Hadron Collider this year will determine once and for all the existence of the Higgs boson. And that will be a very big step, he said.



“We are trying to understand at a very fundamental level how this universe works,” Roser said. “Finding this particle is an important step in doing that.”



Wednesday’s announcement comes after Fermilab director Pier Oddone recently warned that a proposed $30 million federal cut in the laboratory’s budget could significantly affect its research.



The U.S. Department of Energy operates Fermilab.