The UK’s 120th Nobel Prize: The Higgs Boson

On 8 October 2013, Prof. Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh and Prof. François Englert of the Université libre de Bruxelles were awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics “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 CERN’s Large Hadron Collider“.

You will doubtless have read a lot about the Higgs boson in recent years, from the friendly race between the Large Electron-Positron Collider, the Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider to find evidence of its existence to the rampant speculation around the announcement of the discovery at CERN.

Essentially though, the Higgs boson completes the Standard Model of particle physics – the prevailing theory about the fundamental particles and interactions that make up our universe.

Since the 19th century, we have been discovering more and more about the nature of matter and the forces that act upon it. Matter was just stuff, until we discovered that it was made of atoms. Atoms were indivisible, until we discovered that they were made up of protons, neutrons and electrons.

Protons and neutrons were also indivisible, until we discovered that they were made up of quarks. Similarly, light was just light until we discovered photons and the electromagnetic force; protons and neutrons were just particles until we discovered gluons and the strong force.

The Higgs mechanism is essentially a way to show how particles get their mass, a key question in subatomic physics. It was first presented in the 1960s, but only in recent years has particle accelerator technology improved enough to detect the boson (force carrier) responsible and hence validate the theory.

The teams at CERN are made up of hundreds of scientists and engineers from all over the world, including significant contributions from the UK and Canada (the ATLAS experiment is Canadian-led).

This addition to our knowledge of the fundamental forces that underpin our universe is testament to the rigour of British science and its contribution to multinational projects. Prime Minister David Cameron had this to say about the award:

“Professor Peter Higgs has made a huge contribution to science and I am delighted to congratulate him on being awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics. This brilliant achievement is richly deserved recognition of his lifetime of dedicated research and his passion for science. It is also a credit to the world-leading British universities in which this research was carried out, including the University of Edinburgh, Imperial and Kings College London.”