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.

WSJ: Physicists Find Signs of Higgs Boson, or 'God Particle'

The Sommerfeld effect, a quantum-mechanical process that makes particles more likely to interact with one another in some circumstances and less likely in others, is mostly ignored in particle physics because it applies only in a limited range of conditions.

ECONOMIST: Two new ways to detect the elusive stuff of the universe