Two international teams of physicists have found subtle hints of what could be the Higgs boson , a particle whose existence would help explain why other particles have mass. The researchers today announced that they may have uncovered a whiff of the Higgs in data collected at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) , the massive particle accelerator outside Geneva that accelerates protons to nearly light speed before smashing them together so physicists can sift through the wreckage for new particles and phenomena.