Physicists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, said Thursday that the new particle discovered with enormous fanfare last summer definitely looks like a Higgs boson, the particle famously predicted by Peter Higgs and others to imbue elementary particles with mass. But they said they still needed more data to understand how it works and what it means for the universe.

“The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent,” Joe Incandela, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and leader of one of the discovery teams, said in a statement released by CERN. “To me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson, though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is.” Read more.

If you want to brush up on your quantum theory, OCW has published several courses that cover the Higgs boson: