The 42-year race to find a sub-atomic particle crucial to the understanding of the Universe is nearing the finishing line, with Britain and Europe nosing ahead of the US.

European hopes of beating the Americans to find the Higgs boson rely on the construction of the world’s biggest particle collider on the Franco-Swiss border.

When completed, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, will be the biggest and most powerful particle detector. It is expected to be ready for trials by March and, once operational, should reveal the existence of the Higgs boson, nicknamed the God particle, in perhaps a few weeks.

Similar research is being carried out in the US at the Fermilab collider but with far less powerful equipment and less sensitive detectors.

Brian Cox, one of the British particle physicists hoping to find Higgs, said that the LHC would give the Europeans the edge over the American project. “It is a race. If you give Fermilab five years and the Higgs is light enough they could find it but statistically they haven’t much chance of finding it before we get going,” he said.

Dr Cox, of the University of Manchester, said that the future of particle physics depended on finding it. He added: “If it’s there, and I think it is, we’ll find it.” The Higgs boson is a theoretical particle, which is held by physicists to explain why matter has mass. Without it, they will have to devise new theories on how the Universe functions.

Scientists believe that the Higgs boson, proposed by Peter Higgs, then of the University of Edinburgh and now an emeritus professor, winks in and out of existence. It explains mass because it is thought to cling to and drag matter, though why it gives substances varying mass has yet to be adequately explained. The LHC has been designed to be more than seven times more powerful than the American installation, creating 160 million collisions between protons every second.

As part of the project, a 12,500-tonne detector, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) will be lowered 330 feet (100 metres) into the ground this month. A bigger detector, codenamed Atlas, is being constructed 260 feet below the surface and is expected to be fully operational in about a year. Atlas is more than 80 feet tall, and the cavern that contains it is big enough to hold the nave of Westminster Abbey.

The two detectors are linked by a 17-mile tunnel, along which protons will be fired through two tubes in opposite directions at close to the speed of light to smash into each other. Energy and other particles created by the collisions are recorded by detectors. It is hoped that the project, for which Britain has provided almost a fifth of the funding, will uncover far more than just the Higgs boson.

By causing the collisions, scientists are re-creating the conditions of the Universe within a billionth of a second of the Big Bang, and the study of the debris created will cast light on a number of theories.

The idea of supersymmetry, in which every particle is said to have a partner particle, is among those that could be proved or disproved.

The collider creates energy equivalent to 154lbs of TNT

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