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During a few weeks in the summer of 1964, Peter Higgs, a theoretical physicist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, wrote two short papers outlining his ideas for a mechanism that could give mass to fundamental particles, the building blocks of the Universe. His aim was to rescue a theory that was mathematically appealing but ultimately unrealistic because the particles it described had no mass. The second paper drew attention to a measurable consequence of his proposal — it predicted the existence of a new massive particle. Nearly half a century later, the discovery of the predicted particle brought Higgs, who has died aged 94, a share of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics.
The mechanism Higgs described became a key component of the standard model of particle physics during the 1970s, but the associated particle remained stubbornly elusive. Then, in 2012, two giant experiments run by more than 6,000 physicists at CERN, Europe’s high-energy physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, discovered something with the appropriate properties. By then, the particle had achieved fame as the Higgs boson, although the self-effacing Higgs would usually refer to it as ‘the scalar boson’ in reference to its key characteristic of having no intrinsic spin.
Higgs was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1929, but his father’s work as a sound engineer for the BBC took the family to Bristol, where Higgs attended Cotham Grammar School. There, he spotted several mentions on the honours boards of a previous pupil, Paul Dirac, who had earned a share of the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in quantum mechanics. Inspired, Higgs took up physics at King’s College London, where he obtained a PhD in 1954.
As a hitch-hiking student, Higgs had discovered a liking for Edinburgh, so in 1960 he was happy to be appointed as a lecturer there. He picked up on a long-standing interest in symmetry in subatomic particle physics, inspired in particular by the work of the future Nobel prizewinner Yoichiro Nambu, a Japanese American physicist then at the University of Chicago in Illinois. In physics, symmetry is linked to the conservation of quantities such as energy, momentum and electric charge. Working on a theory that had an underlying symmetry but in which particles had no mass, Nambu was attempting to generate mass through a mechanism known as spontaneous symmetry breaking. However, such symmetry breaking would also produce massless particles with zero spin, for which there was no evidence.
The ‘brazen’ science that paved the way for the Higgs boson (and a lot more)
Next-generation LHC: CERN lays out plans for €21-billion supercollider
Peter Higgs: the man behind the God particle
Nature Collection: The Higgs boson discovery turns ten
