Higgs boson scientists win the Nobel Prize for Physics
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Peter Higgs, the theoretical physicist after which the Higgs boson is named, has been awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics. Higgs shares the prize with Francois Englert, another theoretical physicist who reached similar conclusions about the Higgs boson around the same time, in the mid-’60s. Higgs and Englert will share a prize fund of around $1 million, while CERN — which discovered the Higgs boson last year — will receive nothing.
Back in the 1960s, Higgs (pictured above in front of the LHC’s CMS detector) proposed a new elementary particle and mechanism by which other elementary particles gain mass — what we now know to be called the Higgs boson and Higgs field. Around the same time, many other particle physicists also proposed a similar mechanism, including Englert. It isn’t entirely clear why only Higgs and Englert were awarded the Nobel, with Robert Brout, Gerald Guralnik, and many others missing out. Higgs and co postulated that there was a new elementary particle with positive parity and zero spin, which causes other particles to gain mass when they travel through it.
In July 2012, the CMS and ATLAS detectors at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider discovered a particle that appeared to be a Higgs-like boson — and in March 2013, the CERN scientists tentatively confirmed the particle to be the Higgs boson — though they don’t rule out that there could be more Higgs-like bosons out there. CERN’s March 2013 announcement was enough for the Nobel Committee to award Englert and Higgs the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics. The official citation from the Committee read: “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.”
In true Peter Higgs style, who is renowned for being rather shy, he actually went on holiday just before the Nobel Prize was awarded to avoid the publicity and incessant interview requests. In a prepared statement, he said: “I am overwhelmed to receive this award and thank the Royal Swedish Academy. I would also like to congratulate all those who have contributed to the discovery of this new particle and to thank my family, friends and colleagues for their support. I hope this recognition of fundamental science will help raise awareness of the value of blue-sky research.” (Read: What is the Higgs boson and why is it important to science?)
While Higgs and Englert will share around $1 million, CERN will receive nothing — despite the fact that, without the LHC, the Nobel Prize for Physics would’ve been awarded to someone else. Still, CERN director Rolf Heuer doesn’t seem too perturbed, saying: “The discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN last year, which validates the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism, marks the culmination of decades of intellectual effort by many people around the world.” $1 million is, after all, small potatoes compared to the billions that we should be plowing into blue-sky research, rather than weapons research and trillion-dollar wars.— or watch the wonderful video below.