High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The search for the Higgs boson is a 40 year effort by physicists to prove the existence or non-existence of the Higgs boson, first theorised in the 1960s. The Higgs boson is the last unobserved fundamental particle in the Standard Model of particle physics, and its discovery would be the "ultimate verification" of the Standard Model. As of August 2012 the search is widely considered to be in its final stages, a previously unknown boson has been found in July 2012, however it is not yet formally proven whether or not this is the sought-after boson.