The prestigious award goes to Francois Englert and Peter Higgs, who independently proposed what became the Higgs boson discovered in 2012. October 8, 2013 4:03 AM PDT Francois Englert and Peter Higgs meet at CERN in 2012 during an announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson. The discovery came nearly 50 years after they proposed the theory behind it in independent papers that led to their being awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize for physics. (Credit: CERN) After nearly five decades of research to confirm their theory, Francois Englert and Peter Higgs were awarded the Nobel Prize for physics on Tuesday for work that led to last year's discovery of the Higgs boson. The Nobel Prize committee named the winners "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributed to the understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles," said Staffan Normark, permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, at a news conference. The Higgs boson is considered evidence of a pervasive field called the Higgs field that endows other particles with mass, one of the mysterious attributes of physics. It was the last to be discovered of the collection of fundamental particles predicted by what physicists call the Standard Model. But it wasn't easy to find. It took thousands of scientists working at the a underground particle accelerator 27km in circumference called the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, an effort that took years. In 2011 CERN said the LHC had found a hint of the Higgs but stopped well short of declaring it to be verified. In 2012, the scientists declared the likelihood to be 99.99999 percent, then in 2013, increased that even more after gathering more data. Higgs, from the University of Edinburgh in the UK, and Englert, from the L'Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, laid out the case for the Higgs boson in independent papers in 1964. Englert collaborated with another physicist, Robert Brout, who died and therefore isn't eligible for the Nobel Prize is worth about $1.25 million. Updated at 4:40 a.m. PT with further details.
The prestigious award goes to Francois Englert and Peter Higgs, who independently proposed what became the Higgs boson discovered in 2012.
Francois Englert and Peter Higgs meet at CERN in 2012 during an announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson. The discovery came nearly 50 years after they proposed the theory behind it in independent papers that led to their being awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize for physics.
(Credit: CERN)
After nearly five decades of research to confirm their theory, Francois Englert and Peter Higgs were awarded the Nobel Prize for physics on Tuesday for work that led to last year's discovery of the Higgs boson.
The Nobel Prize committee named the winners "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributed to the understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles," said Staffan Normark, permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, at a news conference.
The Higgs boson is considered evidence of a pervasive field called the Higgs field that endows other particles with mass, one of the mysterious attributes of physics. It was the last to be discovered of the collection of fundamental particles predicted by what physicists call the Standard Model.
But it wasn't easy to find. It took thousands of scientists working at the a underground particle accelerator 27km in circumference called the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, an effort that took years.
In 2011 CERN said the LHC had found a hint of the Higgs but stopped well short of declaring it to be verified. In 2012, the scientists declared the likelihood to be 99.99999 percent, then in 2013, increased that even more after gathering more data.
Higgs, from the University of Edinburgh in the UK, and Englert, from the L'Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, laid out the case for the Higgs boson in independent papers in 1964. Englert collaborated with another physicist, Robert Brout, who died and therefore isn't eligible for the Nobel Prize is worth about $1.25 million.
Updated at 4:40 a.m. PT with further details.
