Scientists at Cern, giving a progress report on the search using the Large Hadron Collider, believe they are almost at the point of confirming the existence of the Higgs boson, named after Peter Higgs, the Edinburgh University emeritus professor of physics.

Almost, but not quite.

Sergio Bertolucci, director for research and computing at Cern, said: "We now have more than double the data we had last year. That should be enough to see whether the trends we were seeing in the 2011 data are still there, or whether they have gone away. It's a very exciting time."