The physicists are Cern are asking the general public to help out in the hunt for the elusive Higgs boson.

The Citizen Cyberscience Centre at Cern has launched LHC@home 2.0 -- a grid computing project which "simulates collisions between two beams of protons travelling at almost the speed of light in the Large Hadron Collider".

An extension of the LHC@home platform, which launched in 2004, the Test4Theory project will use volunteers' home computers to run the simulations in "downtime" -- in much the same way as the Folding@home project does. The data is then sent back to Cern when it will be compared with real data from the four LHC experiments.

Recently, Wired.co.uk reported that teams from both the ATLAS and Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiments spotted "excess events" in the energy range of 130-150 GeV -- right in the middle of the unexplored zone in which the Higgs particle has been predicted will be found. But, as exciting as this glimpse was, it does not qualify as the longed-for discovery, which the Cern scientists are now hoping the public can help bring about. 

Alongside LHC@home 2.0, the Citizen Cyberscience Centre is already running a series of projects "providing a low cost technology for researchers in developing countries". These include UNOSAT, which uses data from space agencies and satellite operators to map, for example, damage after a natural disaster, or monitoring deforestation. Volunteers are provided with the raw data and then asked to analyse the imagery and share their findings.

To get involved in LHC@home 2.0, simply hit this link to download the necessary software and configure your computer.