CERN physicists hope to find the Higgs boson in the next two years at their souped up accelerator

Will they find it, or won't they? The physicists at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, have begun a race against the clock to try to identify a phantom particle that they've been chasing in vain for a decade. Since the first of August, LEP (the Large Electron-Positron Collider), the giant accelerator currently operating at CERN, has been running flat out. Its mission is to find the Higgs boson before December 2000, when it will be closed for construction...

No other accelerator now operating in the world is capable of discovering this phantom boson. [If they don't find it at LEP], physicists will have to wait for the start of the LHC, planned for 2005 at the earliest, or for their future American competitor, Fermilab's Tevatron, in Chicago, in its upgraded Run III, which, if funding comes through, will produce its first beams at the same time...