News & Events

On October 8th the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2013 to Francois Englert (from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, in Belgium) and to Peter Higgs (from the University of Edinburgh in UK) "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC)".

Last year, on July 4th, physicists working on the LHC experiments CMS and ATLAS announced the observation of a new particle whose properties were fully consistent with the Higgs boson, the missing piece in the Standard Model of Particle Physics, and theoretically predicted by Brout, Englert and Higgs in the sixties. More concretely, the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism was first proposed in 1964 in two papers which were published independently, one by Robert Brout and Francois Englert and the other one by Peter Higgs.

This mechanism accommodates both long and short range interactions in a single theory, and predicts the existence of a massive scalar field, the Higgs boson, which permeates the vacuum and gives masses to the fields interacting with it. The discovery of the Higgs boson by the LHC experiment confirms that this mechanism operates in nature.

Links:

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2013/press.html

http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2013/10/CERN-congratulates-Englert-and-Higgs-on-Nobel-in-physics

and funny! cern physicists listening to the noble price announcement:

http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2013/10/watch-cern-physicists-react-nobel-announcement