CERN physicists are now in possession of new data that could point with greater certainty where to find the Higgs boson or "God-particle" which has long been sought by scientists.

The data from two main experiments using the Large Hadron Collider, CERN's $10 billion atom smasher, will be made public next week, according to CERN scientists. Professor John Ellis, a former head of theoretical physics at CERN, saying he expects to catch a "first glimpse" of the Higgs boson soon.

"I think we are going to get the first glimpse. The LHC experiments have already looked high and low for this missing piece. It could be that it weighs several hundred times the proton mass, but that seems very unlikely, then there's a whole intermediate range where we know it cannot be, then there's the low mass range where we actually expect it might be. There seem to be some hints emerging there... and that's what we're going to learn on Tuesday," Professor Ellis said.

The two teams of scientists used two separate detectors, called ATLAS and CMS, and next week each team will each reveal the outcome of their experiment based on latest data from LHC collisions.

Finding the Higgs boson would be an enormous scientific breakthrough, as it would explain why different particles have different masses, and eventually explain the origins of the universe. During the experiments, high energy beams of protons were sent crashing into each other though a 17-mile (27-kilometer tunnel) to see what happens when they collide.

"What's exciting is we know we're close to getting something in focus. We know we're close to the stage where we're going to see something," said Joe Incandela, a physicist who will lead one of CERN's two main experiments next year.

However, Sergio Bertolucci, director of research at CERN, was more cautious. Susan Watts of BBC news reported that according to Bertolucci, he expects next Tuesday's result to amount to less than the formal definition of "evidence" but the statistics will be "very interesting."

"It's too early to say...I think we may get indications that are not consistent with its non-existence," Bertolucci told BBC News.