360CERN announces the discovery of the Higgs boson
On 4 July 2012, scientists at CERN, near Geneva, announced that two experiments at the Large Hadron Collider had found a new particle matching the Higgs boson. Predicted in 1964, the particle helps explain why other basic particles have mass. Peter Higgs and François Englert shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics.
In 1964, several physicists, including Peter Higgs in Edinburgh and François Englert and Robert Brout in Brussels, proposed that an invisible field fills the universe and gives basic particles their mass. If the field existed, it should come with a particle, later called the Higgs boson.
For decades, no machine was powerful enough to find it. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, a 27 km ring buried under the French-Swiss border, began work in 2008. It smashes protons together at nearly the speed of light.
On 4 July 2012, the two largest experiments at the collider, ATLAS and CMS, each reported a new particle with a mass of about 125 times that of a proton. Further work confirmed that it behaved like the Higgs boson.
The discovery completed the Standard Model, physicists' best description of the basic particles and forces of nature. Thousands of scientists from more than 100 countries took part.
In 2013, Peter Higgs and François Englert were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.
- 1964
- The Higgs mechanism is proposed
- 2008
- The Large Hadron Collider starts up
- 4 July 2012
- The discovery is announced
- 2013
- Nobel Prize for Higgs and Englert
Sources: CERN · NobelPrize.org · Britannica.