Before July 4, 2012, the Higgs boson mass could only be in the 122 GeV to 130 GeV mass range (units where the proton mass is about 1 GeV, and the W and Z vector bosons are 80 GeV and 90 GeV, respectively).
The search for Higgs got its biggest boost in December when researchers at the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, near Geneva, Switzerland, said that data from two independent experiments had narrowed the range of the would-be particle's likely mass to between 124 and 126 gigaelectronvolts, or GeV.