Right now, most of the physicists doing the work do not even know what they have. In order to avoid bias, the physicists involved avoided looking at most of the crucial data until last week, when they “unblinded” it. About 500 physicists on each team are analyzing eight different ways a Higgs boson, once produced in the collider, might decay and leave its signature.

They all have to sign off on the final results, making for a very tight timetable.

“Our final Ichep results will not be even seen by the collaboration before the last day of June and then will require the usual final cosmetics for presentation,” wrote Joe Incandela of the University of California, Santa Barbara, spokesman for the team known as CMS, in an e-mail.

The particle is named for the University of Edinburgh scientist Peter Higgs, who was one of six physicists who suggested that a sort of cosmic molasses pervading space is what gives particles their heft. Particles trying to wade through it gather mass the way a bill moving though Congress gains riders and amendments, becoming more and more ponderous.

It was Dr. Higgs who pointed out that this cosmic molasses, normally invisible and, of course, odorless, would produce its own quantum particle if hit hard enough, by the right amount of energy, and so the branding rights went to him.

The current run of the Large Hadron Collider, which accelerates protons to energies of four trillion electron volts around a 17-mile underground racetrack at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, before banging them together into tiny fireballs of primordial energy, was designed to get the two experiments enough data so that they could each independently decide by the end of the year whether the Higgs boson exists.

Another possible hangup is that the two groups disagreed slightly last fall on the mass of the putative particle. The Atlas group put it at 124 billion electron volts, while the CMS group came up with 126 billion electron volts, in the units of mass and energy favored by physicists. By comparison, a proton weighs in at one billion electron volts and an electron at half a million.

If the discrepancy persists, it could undermine attempts to reach that statistical rigor.

Failure to find the Higgs would not be the end of the theory in which it is embedded, known as the Standard Model, which has passed every test for 30 years. But it would require physicists to go back to their blackboards for another method of imputing mass to particles.

Without such a mechanism, said Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas in Austin, who won a Nobel for using the Higgs theory to unify the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces, the universe would be bleak. Elementary particles like quarks and electrons would be massless. “Atomic nuclei would still exist, but electrons would be massless, and so there would be no atoms,” he said. “And of course no life. Not even physicists.”