The discoveres of the Higgs boson!
Peter Higgs, from the UK, and Francois Englert from Belgium, share this year’s the prize.
In the 1960s they were among the group of physicists who proposed a mechanism to explain why the most basic subatomic particles of the Universe have mass.
The particle responsible for the mechanism, the Higgs boson, was finally discovered in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern, in Switzerland (I reported on that, too).
The official citation reads: “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”.
Congratulations, Mr. Englert and Mr. Higgs!