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Portrait of Peter Higgs

Science · Physics

Peter Higgs

1929–2024 · British

Theoretical particle physics

Peter Higgs was a British theoretical physicist at the University of Edinburgh who in 1964 proposed a mechanism by which elementary particles acquire mass, predicting a new particle now called the Higgs boson. After the boson was discovered at CERN's Large Hadron Collider in 2012, he shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics with François Englert. He died in Edinburgh in April 2024.

How to spot them

  • ▸The Higgs boson, detected by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN (announced 4 July 2012)
  • ▸The Higgs mechanism (1964), proposed about the same time by Brout and Englert and by Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble
  • ▸Disliked the nickname 'the God particle'
  • ▸Shared the 2013 Nobel Prize with François Englert; declined a knighthood but became a Companion of Honour

Key discoveries & works

Mechanism by which elementary particles acquire mass (1964 papers) (1964)

Published in Physics Letters and Physical Review Letters; explicitly predicted a massive scalar boson

Prediction of the scalar boson found at the Large Hadron Collider (1964 (confirmed 2012))

Discovery announced at CERN by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations

Spontaneous Symmetry Breakdown without Massless Bosons (1966)

Physical Review paper developing his 1964 mechanism in detail

Scalar field pervading space that gives W and Z bosons their mass (1964)

The field whose excitation is the boson found in 2012

Key ideas

  • A field pervading space gives mass to particles such as the W and Z bosons through spontaneous symmetry breaking

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born in Newcastle upon Tyne on 29 May 1929; died in Edinburgh on 8 April 2024
  • •Nobel Prize in Physics 2013, shared with François Englert, for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism contributing to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles
  • •Took his PhD at King's College London (1954) and spent most of his career at the University of Edinburgh
  • •Went to Cotham Grammar School in Bristol, where Paul Dirac had been a pupil
  • •Shared the Wolf Prize in Physics in 2004 with Robert Brout and François Englert
  • •Declined a knighthood and was appointed a Companion of Honour in 2013
  • •The nickname 'God particle' comes from the title of a 1993 book by Leon Lederman; Higgs himself disliked it

Drill it — 6 cards

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Sources