Higgs boson

The Higgs boson was discovered in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS experimental collaborations at CERN's Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. The official announcement was made on July 4, 2012, confirming the existence of the last undiscovered particle predicted by the Standard Model.

The particle was independently proposed in 1964 by Peter Higgs and by François Englert and Robert Brout, working from earlier ideas by physicist Philip Anderson. Higgs and Englert were awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for the theoretical discovery; Brout had passed away in 2011 and was therefore ineligible.

Particles acquire mass by interacting with the Higgs field, an invisible energy field that pervades all of space. Particles that couple strongly to the field—like the W and Z bosons—acquire large mass, while particles like the photon do not interact with the field and remain massless. The Higgs boson itself is simply a detectable excitation of this field.

The Higgs boson has a mass of approximately 125 GeV (gigaelectronvolts), which is roughly 133 times the mass of a proton. This relatively light mass was measured through the decay products observed by the ATLAS and CMS detectors, since the particle decays almost instantly after being produced in collider collisions.