"There's certainly evidence for something, whether it's the Higgs boson is questionable," Dr Renton, a particle physicist at Oxford, told BBC News Online.

"It's compatible with the Higgs boson certainly, but only a direct observation would show that."

If correct, Dr Renton's assessment would place the elusive particle's mass at about 115 gigaelectronvolts.

This comes from a signal obtained at the large electron positron collider (LEP) in Geneva, Switzerland, which has now been dismantled to make way for its replacement - the large hadron collider (LHC).

However, there is a 9% probability that the signal could be background "noise".