Scientists whose capture of the 'God particle' hit the headlines three years ago have obtained a new and much sharper picture of their trophy.

Data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's biggest atom smasher, have greatly increased what physicists know about the Higgs boson, which is responsible for giving other elementary particles mass.

The results show with a new level of precision the way the particle is generated and decays, and how it interacts with other particles.

All the measured properties match the predictions of the Standard Model, the theory encompassing all of nature's subatomic particles, forces and interactions that has stood the test of time since the 1970s.

The missing Higgs boson was a yawning gap in the Standard Model until the discovery of a particle with its properties was dramatically announced by LHC scientists in 2012.

Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, which operates the LHC - a massive particle accelerator straddling the French and Swiss border - later confirmed that the particle was a Higgs boson.

Without the Higgs boson the universe would be cold, dark and lifeless. Because of its fundamental importance, the Higgs was nicknamed the 'God particle'.

Its discovery won a share of the Nobel prize for physics for Professor Peter Higgs, the University of Edinburgh scientist who predicted the existence of the particle in the 1960s and lent it his name.

Data from two of the LHC's giant particle collision detectors, CMS and Atlas, were combined to provide the new Higgs boson profile.

Cern director general Professor Rolf Heuer said: 'The Higgs boson is a fantastic new tool to test the Standard Model of particle physics and study the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles.

'There is much benefit in combining the results of large experiments to reach the high precision needed for the next breakthrough in our field.

'By doing so, we achieve what for a single experiment, would have meant running for at least two more years.'
LARGE HADRON COLLIDER: THE GREAT SWITCH ON

The LHC was restarted on April 5 this year, having been turned off for two years during a major renovation project that cost £100 million.

The world's largest atom-smashing machine is most famous for proving the existence of the Higgs boson.

Physicists at Cern, the Geneva-based organisation which runs the LHC, are aiming to see dark matter for the first time ever thanks to the device's upgrade.

Instead, they have discovered the pentaquark, for now.

The LHC is situated underground below the border between Switzerland and France, and consists of nearly 17 miles of circular tunnels.

It was shut down so that its energy levels could be almost doubled, allowing scientists to carry out more extreme experiments.