TORONTO - Canadian scientists involved in the search for the so-called "God particle" say they have seen hints that it exists and are closer to a discovery that would not only help explain how the universe was created, but also open the door to technological advances we can't even imagine.

The latest data from various teams working on the international project shows that the mass of the Higgs boson, considered to be a basic building block for the universe, likely falls in the lower end of the spectrum of mass that can be produced by smashing protons together in the Large Hadron Collider.

That not only narrows the search but gives some proof that it exists -- although it isn't enough yet to consider it definitive.

"We're at the point where we can really see, clearly, whether the Higgs is there or not," said the University of Toronto's William Trischuk, a member of the research team and director of the Canadian Institute of Particle Physics.

"I liken it to the Mars rover that has landed and they turned on the camera and they can see for the first time. They haven't dug up all the soil and sorted out whether there are microbes there or not, but we know we can see whether the Higgs is there or whether there's something beyond that, and that's incredibly exciting."

Trischuk is one of 150 Canadian professors, post-doctoral fellows and students from 10 universities working on the project along with more than 2,500 scientists and engineers from 178 institutions worldwide.

The European teams work for CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, which runs the $10-billion Large Hadron Collider, a 27-kilometre tunnel under the Swiss-French border where high energy beams of protons are sent crashing into each other at incredible speeds.

The ATLAS detector, designed to search for new particles in the highest mass collisions of high-energy protons in the collider, was built with the help of Canada.

In joint announcements made in Canada and Geneva, scientists said their data indicates the most likely mass of the Higgs boson is around 124 to 126 billion electron volts.

The revelation was highly anticipated by thousands of researchers who hope that the particle, theorized by British physicist Peter Higgs and others more than 40 years ago, can help explain why there is mass in the universe.

If a discovery is actually made, something Trischuk suggests could happen as early as next summer, it won't be a single "Eureka" moment by one scientist, he said, but a show of what so many minds together can accomplish.

"Understanding the world around you is satisfying, and it's always what we're trying to do as human beings," said Robert Orr, the founder of the U of T team.

"But it's a bit more important that. Our whole society has evolved through (science) -- all computers, iPads, electric appliances, digital cameras, microphones, fluorescent lights -- they all depend on our understanding of how electricity and magnetism are unified into this electro-magnetic force."

The technological implications of such a finding are as hard to describe now as it would have been for physicists working 200 years ago to explain how one could build a Large Hadron Collider to smash protons in, he added.

"This is the gateway to the next step to really understand exactly how electro-magnetic and weak interactions are unified," said Trischuk.

"You need a good science fiction writer to know where they're going."

Frank Wilczek, a Nobel laureate and physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said finding the Higgs boson would tie up a loose end of the so-called standard model of physics, which requires that a Higgs-like particle exists.

Proving the Higgs exists would be "a vindication of the equations we've been using all these years," he said. "Since the equations have worked so brilliantly now for decades, it's really nice to dot the i's and cross the t's," he said.

In addition, if the mass of the Higgs is within a certain range, that would support some other theories that go beyond and improve the standard model, he said. Those theories predict the existence of still other particles to be found. That would mean the Large Hadron Collider "will have another wave of brilliant discoveries in the future," Wilczek said.