Scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider have found no evidence that the new particle discovered earlier this year is anything but the simplest - and most boring - variety of Higgs boson.
Staff at Cern, the particle physics lab near Geneva, celebrated in July after they found what looked like the elusive boson amid the debris of scores of high-energy collisions inside the huge machine.
At the time, preliminary results from the two main experiments, Atlas and CMS, hinted that the particle might be something more exciting than the singular beast originally described in equations nearly 50 years ago. A more exotic Higgs could pave the way to a profound new understanding of nature.
But fresh data released by both teams at a conference in Kyoto, Japan, yesterday show that - so far at least - there is nothing peculiar about the particle's behaviour. The results do not completely rule out a more exotic Higgs particle, though.
"The particle is still there, and it's certainly staying consistent with the Standard Model," said Joe Incandela, head of the CMS detector team.
The Higgs particle was first postulated in 1964 as a single entity whose existence betrays an invisible field that spreads through space and gives mass to fundamental particles, including the basic building blocks of matter.