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Tribute to Peter Higgs

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Professor Peter Higgs has died at the age of 94. He predicted the existence of the boson that bears his name and was discovered 12 years ago.

Peter Giggs © 2008 CERN / Claudia Marcelloni

Peter Higgs

In 1964, physicist Peter Higgs predicted the existence of a new type of fundamental particle, known as the Higgs boson. On 4 July 2012, his prediction proved correct: the ATLAS and CMS collaborations presented CERN with data from the LHC indicating the existence of a particle with properties consistent with those of a Higgs boson, through which W, Z and other particles acquire their mass. And Peter Higgs was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013.

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Let’s see the slide show on the LHC

© Patrick DUMAS / LHC / CNRS Photothèque

Read CNRS News article about first ten years of the LHC

Jacques Martino director of the IN2P3 of the CNRS speaks about the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 awarded to François Englert of the Free University of Brussels and to the British Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh. In 1964, these two researchers had postulated the existence of a particle, the Higgsboson. On 4 July 2012, the CERN, the European nuclear research organisation, officially announced the discovery of this particle.

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Alexander Zabi, Jessica Leveque and Marumi Kado, CNRS physicists explain how they seek the missing link of particle physics, the Higgs boson, a particle predicted for over 40 years but never observed. This is due to the particle accelerator, the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) that are produced proton collisions at very high energies, which are recorded in experiments such as Atlas and CMS. The observation of the decay products of the Higgs boson would be a major breakthrough in understanding the…

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