SCIENTISTS suggest they may be able to definitively announce within months the discovery of the elusive Higgs boson.

The statement came as experts at Europe's CERN Large Hadron Collider research project dismissed reports they might have a pair, rather than just one type of elementary particle.

It follows a claim they appeared to found what appeared to be the particle that gives mass to matter. It was imagined and named 50 years ago by theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, an emeritus professor at Edinburgh University. But the experts stopped short of saying for sure it was the Higgs boson, pending further research.

"The latest data we have on this thing we have been watching for the past few months show that it is not simply 'like a Higgs' but is very like a Higgs," said Oliver Buechmuller of the CMS team at CERN. "The way things are going, by the Moriond meeting we may be able to stop calling it Higgs-like and finally say it is the Higgs," he said, referring to the gathering in March.

Suggestions that there may be two Higgs, a particle that made formation of the universe possible after the Big Bang, emerged after a report by CERN. Its definitive discovery would almost certainly win a Nobel Prize.

Commentators said differing measurements of the boson's mass recorded by the ATLAS team at CERN indicated there may be twin particles. "That is quite an exaggeration," ATLAS scientist Pauline Gagnon said.