Prof Hill himself is part of the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) Collaboration at the LHC.
This distance-related decline is strong evidence of a gradual shift from muon-to tau-flavoured neutrinos.
But occasionally a neutrino reacts with an atom to create a particle called a muon.
But experiments have kept turning up almost equal numbers of electron and muon neutrinos.
The discovery of the muon neutrino gave Leon Lederman, Melvin Schwartz, and Jack Steinberger the Nobel Prize in 1988.
What the team found was that the number of muon neutrinos did indeed decline the farther away from the detector they came from.
The distribution of the detectors triggered allows the direction of the Cherenkov radiation, and therefore the flight direction of the muon, to be worked out.
The theory is that when a muon encounters a gas molecule, it can knock off an electron, leaving a positively charged ion in its wake.
They are known to exist in three types related to three different charged particles - the electron and its lesser-known relatives, the muon and the tau.
The reason is that another experimental result, published in 1995 by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, showed signs of a third sort of oscillation, from muon-to electron-flavoured neutrinos.
Theory predicts that when cosmic rays (fast particles coming from outer space) collide with air molecules in the upper atmosphere, they should yield twice as many muon neutrinos as electron neutrinos.
Physicists who supported the idea that neutrinos have mass suspected that the discrepancy was due to some muon neutrinos evading detection by surreptitiously converting to the third variety tau neutrinos during their flight.
If and when a neutrino does bump into something, the interaction spits out one of three particles an electron, a muon or a tau (the last two are heavy, unstable objects with most of the characteristics of an electron).
After orchestrating 2 million collisions between lead nuclei and protons, like the sort you see above, the collider's Compact Muon Solenoid group and researchers at MIT suspect that stray, linked pairs of gluon particles in the mix were signs of color-glass condensate, a currently theory-only form of matter that sees gluons travel in liquid-like, quantum-entangled waves.
ENGADGET: Large Hadron Collider may have produced a previously undetected form of matter
"The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is, " Joe Incandela, spokesperson for the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, said in a statement.
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