![]() Immediately after the discovery, physicists began to study the properties of the newly-found particle to understand if it was the Standard Model Higgs boson or something else. ![]() Will the Standard Model continue to survive the precision measurements of the LHC or will an improved model appear? Only through continued study and more data will physicists be able to answer this question. Higgs bosons now become a tool for physicists, studying the properties of particles produced alongside the Higgs boson in search of new discoveries. Many theories also predict that the Higgs boson plays a critical role in the production of new phenomena such as dark matter at the LHC. Supersymmetry, for example, predicts the existence of at least five different types of Higgs bosons. The discovery of the Higgs boson has opened up new windows in the search for new physics phenomena, since its properties – and even the number of distinct types of Higgs boson – are predicted to be different in different theoretical models. On 8 October 2013, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded jointly to theorists François Englert and Peter Higgs " 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". On 4 July 2012, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN announced that they had independently observed a new particle in the mass region of around 125 GeV: a particle consistent with the Higgs boson. Existence of this field could be verified by discovery of its associated particle – the Higgs boson. The BEH mechanism requires the presence of a new field throughout the universe which gives mass to some of the bosons. To solve this problem, three teams of theorists: Robert Brout and François Englert Peter Higgs Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen, and Tom Kibble independently proposed a solution now referred to as the Brout-Englert-Higgs (BEH) mechanism. Yet, experiments showed that the carriers of the weak nuclear interaction – the W and Z bosons – had large masses. In 1964, the only mathematically consistent theory required bosons to be massless. Photons, for example, are bosons carrying the electromagnetic force. Physicists describe particle interactions using the mathematics of quantum field theory, in which forces are carried by intermediate particles called bosons. Higgs lives modestly in a flat in Edinburgh's New Town.Animation of the reconstructed mass from Higgs candidate events in two-photon decays. In the same year it was announced that he would share the Nobel Prize for Physics with Belgian physicist François Englert. Higgs was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1974, a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1983 and was admitted to the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) in the New Year's Honours List of 2013. The search for the Higgs boson became the major objective of experimental particle physics and this search was a significant impetus behind the building of the £2.6-billion Large Hadron Collider at CERN (Switzerland), one of the most expensive scientific experiments ever constructed. It is said he gained inspiration for this theory while walking in the Cairngorm Mountains. It also predicted the existence of a new particle which became known as the Higgs boson. He is best known for a theory which explained the origin of mass of elementary particles through the interaction with a field, which became known as the Higgs field. He was promoted to a Personal Chair in Theoretical Physics in 1980 and retired from the University in 1996. After a few years back in London, he returned to Edinburgh in 1960 as a lecturer in Mathematical Physics. Although born in Wallsend ( Newcastle upon Tyne), the son of a BBC sound engineer, raised in Bristol and educated at King's College London, Higgs came to the University of Edinburgh as a researcher 1954-56. Nobel prize-winning theoretical physicist, known for the Higgs boson.
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