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Researchers for the very first time have succeeded in finding the evidence for the direct decay of the Higgs boson into fermions. Up until now, the Higgs particle could only be detected through its decay into bosons. 

"This is a major step forwards," said Professor Vincenzo Chiochia from the University of Zurich's Physics Institute, whose group was involved in analyzing the data. "We now know that the Higgs particle can decay into both bosons and fermions, which means we can exclude certain theories predicting that the Higgs particle does not couple to fermions."

The discovery of a new boson with a mass approximately 125 GeV in 2012 at the LHC marks a new era in understanding the nature of electroweak symmetry breaking. The understanding would also extend to possibly completing the standard model of particle physics.

"This prediction was confirmed," said Chiochia; "a strong indication that the particle discovered in 2012 actually behaves like the Higgs particle proposed in the theory."

"In nature, there are two types of particles: fermions and bosons," said Ketino "Keti" Kaadze, a research associate at Fermilab who in August is joining the faculty at Kansas State University's physics department, according to UPP. "Fermions, quarks and leptons make up all the matter around us. Bosons are responsible for mediating interaction between the elementary particles."

The study has been published in the Nature Physics Journal.