The particle has been the subject of a 45-year hunt to explain how matter attains its mass.

Both of the two Higgs-hunting experiments at the Large Hadron Collider have reached a level of certainty worthy of a "discovery".

More work will be needed to be certain that what they see is a Higgs, however.

The CMS team claimed they had seen a "bump" in their data corresponding to a particle weighing in at 125.3 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) - about 133 times heavier than the proton at the heart of every atom.

Indications are strong, but it remains to be seen whether the particle the team reports is in fact the Higgs - those answers will certainly not come on Wednesday.

The result announced at Cern, home of the LHC in Geneva, was met with applause.

The CMS team claimed that by combining two of its data sets, they had attained a confidence level just at the "five-sigma" point - about a one-in-3.5 million chance that the signal they see would appear if there were no Higgs particle.

However, a full combination of the CMS data brings that number just back to 4.9 sigma - a one-in-2 million chance.

Joe Incandela, spokesman for CMS, was unequivocal.

"The results are preliminary but the five-sigma signal at around 125 GeV we're seeing is dramatic. This is indeed a new particle," he told the Geneva meeting.

Atlas results were even more promising.

"We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of five sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV," said Fabiola Gianotti, spokeswoman for the Atlas experiment at the LHC.
Massive problem

Anticipation had been high and rumours were rife before the announcement.

New data presented here in Geneva have shown that researchers are now tantalisingly close to confirming the Higgs' existence and bringing to an end the decades-long quest for the most coveted prize in physics.
A confirmation would be one of the biggest scientific discoveries of the century; the hunt for the Higgs has been compared by some physicists to the Apollo programme that reached the Moon in the 1960s.

Two different experiment teams at the LHC observe a signal in the same part of the "search region" for the Higgs - at a rough mass of 125 Gigaelectronvolts (GeV).

Hints of the particle, revealed to the world by teams at the LHC in December 2011, have since strengthened markedly.

The $10bn LHC is the most powerful particle accelerator ever built: it smashes two beams of protons together at close to the speed of light with the aim of revealing new phenomena in the wreckage of the collisions.

The Atlas and CMS experiments, which were designed to hunt for the Higgs at the LHC, each detect a signal with a statistical certainty of more than 4.5 sigma.

Five sigma is the generally accepted benchmark for claiming the discovery of a new particle. It equates to a one in 3.5 million chance that there is no Higgs and the "bump" in the data is down to some statistical fluctuation.