The discovery is likely to end the more than 40-year quest to find the so-called "God particle", which could help explain why matter has mass and open up new horizons in subatomic science.
First proposed as a theory in the 1960s, the particle, thought to be a fundamental building block of the universe, has since been sought by generations of physicists who believed it would help shape our understanding of how the universe formed and how particles clumped together to form stars and planets.
The findings have recently been announced by researchers at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN), which operates outside Geneva, Switzerland, along the Swiss-French border.
The new particle appears to share many of the same qualities predicted by Scottish scientist Dr Peter Higgs and others decades ago.
Dr Rodger said this was a "very exciting" discovery.
A new particle had been found, but it remained to be fully confirmed if this was, in fact, the Higgs boson, he said.
At this stage, it was unclear exactly what the technological implications of the boson's discovery would be, just as it had also been unknown at that time what would flow from the discovery of the electron by the British physicist Joseph John ("J.J.") Thomson in 1897.
This finding had subsequently revolutionised the understanding of atomic structure and had huge implications for modern electrical technology.
Dr Rodger said the boson discovery highlighted the value of the multi-billion dollar CERN atom-smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, which had been used to find the boson particle.
Dr Ben Whale, a postdoctoral fellow in the Otago mathematics and statistics department, said exact nature of the latest discovery had yet to be confirmed.
If the Higgs Boson had been found, that highlighted the "incredible" power of theoretical mathematics to describe and predict previously unknown parts of the real world, in a highly precise way.
Asked what the discovery could mean in terms of the so-called "theory of everything", an elusive unified field theory, he said "every little step helps us get closer to that goal".
Dr Whale's research interests include general relativity and black holes.