measured at approximately 125 gigaelectronvolts (GeV). For those outside the particle physics community, this might seem like a minor detail. But the mass of the Higgs is more than a mere number.
There's something very curious about its value that could have profound implications for the Universe. Mathematical models allow for the possibility that our cosmos is long-lived yet not entirely stable, and may - at some indeterminate point - be destroyed.
"The overall stability of the Universe depends on the Higgs mass - which is a bit funny," said Prof Jordan Nash, a particle physicist from Imperial College London, who works on the CMS experiment at Cern.
"There's a long theoretical argument which I won't go into, but that value is intriguing in that it sits on the edge between what we think is the long-term stability of the Universe and a Universe that has a finite lifetime."
To use an analogy, imagine the Higgs boson is an object resting at the bottom of a curved slope. If that resting place really is the lowest point on the slope, then the vacuum of space is completely stable - in other words, it is in the lowest energy state and can go no further.
However, if at some point further along this slope, there's another dip, the potential exists for the Universe to "topple" into this lower energy state, or minimum. If that happens, the vacuum of space collapses, dooming the cosmos.
"The Higgs mass is in that place where it gets interesting, where it's no longer guaranteed that there are no other minima," Prof Nash, who works on the CMS experiment at Cern, told the BBC. But there's no need to worry, the models suggest such a rare event would not occur for a very, very long time - many times further into the future, in fact, than the current age of the Universe.
This idea of a finite lifetime for the cosmos is dependent on the Standard Model being the ultimate scheme in physics. But there is much in the Universe - gravitation and dark matter, for example - that the Standard Model can't fully explain, so there are reasons to think that's not the case.
The existence of exotic particles, such as those predicted by the theory known as supersymmetry, would shore up the stability of the Universe in those mathematical models.
But as previously mentioned, searches for these particles, called superpartners, have so far drawn a blank, as have attempts to detect dark matter, extra dimensions, and other phenomena beyond the Standard Model. Hopes that the LHC would allow scientists to lift the veil on a whole new realm of physics have proved optimistic, at least during its initial run.
Some versions of supersymmetry have already been all but ruled out by the LHC. But the theory has many forms, depending on how you tweak the mathematical parameters.
"From the theory community's point of view, this is all very interesting because it fleshes out much better what the first run of the LHC has excluded," said Prof Dave Charlton, who leads the Atlas experiment at Cern.
"Therefore, it better establishes where we should be looking for new signals next year."
Assuming the theorists are indeed correct, supersymmetry will have to wait some time longer for its big reveal.
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http://press.web.cern.ch/backgrounders/w-prime-and-z-prime....
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