"In the early days of the twentieth century, particle physics was in its infancy, with only two types of particles known: the proton and the electron. From the 1930s on, physicists were inundated by a deluge of new particles. In his 1955 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Willis Lamb quipped that "the finder of a new elementary particle used to be rewarded by a Nobel Prize, but such a discovery now ought to be punished by a $10,000 fine." As time went on, particle physicists discovered the eightfold way—particle physics' equivalent of the periodic table—which ultimately led to the "standard model" of particle physics. To date, every particle predicted by the standard model has been experimentally verified, with the exception of the elusive Higgs particle.

The Higgs particle is theorized to be the reason why some particles, such as the W and Z bosons, have mass, while other force carriers, like the photon, are massless. Previous work has put lower and upper limits on the mass of this particle. CERN's Large Electron-Positron collider has been unable to find the Higgs particle at masses below 114 GeV, setting this as a lower bound for the mass. Studies of the electroweak force suggest that the Higgs particle must weigh less than 185 GeV. Now, work by a collaboration of the DZero and CDF particle discovery groups (each of those are collaborations in their own right) has narrowed this window even further". (Ars Technica)