BATAVIA – Fermilab officials are looking at whether layoffs are needed after only 44 employees recently were accepted into a voluntary separation program.

Last month, Fermilab director Pier Oddone told employees the lab will need to cut about 100 jobs to ease financial difficulties at the facility. Of the 56 employees who applied to voluntarily give up their jobs, 44 were approved, said Bruce Chrisman, chief operating officer at Fermilab.

"We still have to look at whether layoffs are necessary," Chrisman said. He said the Department of Energy would have to approve any layoffs.

Chrisman said most of those who applied for the program were eligible for retirement.

"Most of them had been here quite a while," he said.

With the 44 employees who are leaving, Fermilab will have just under 1,900 employees, Chrisman said.

At one time, Fermilab had the world's largest atom smasher. But in 2009, the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland broke the world record for proton acceleration, firing particle beams with 20 percent more power than Fermilab 's Tevatron, which previously held the record.

The Tevatron is set to shut down in September after losing out on additional federal funds to continue its operation.

But scientists working with the particle collider keep making new discoveries.

They recently announced the observation of a new particle and said they are closer to finding the elusive Higgs boson, which is believed to give mass to matter that makes up the universe.

Scientists from both the CDF and DZero collider experiments at Fermilab presented their new Higgs search results at this week's EPS High-Energy Physics conference, held in Grenoble, France.