Peter Higgs

Peter Ware Higgs was born on May 29, 1929, in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. He is known for his theoretical work on the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles, especially his prediction of the existence of the Higgs boson.

In October 1964, Peter Higgs published a paper proposing a mechanism for the spontaneous symmetry breaking in gauge theories, which implies the existence of a massive scalar particle now known as the Higgs boson. This work was seminal in theoretical physics and contributed to what is now called the Higgs mechanism.

On October 19, 1964, Peter Higgs submitted a second paper extending his previous work to specify the properties of the new particle, which came to be known as the Higgs boson. This paper laid the foundation for the concept of a particle that would help explain the mass of other particles through electroweak symmetry breaking.

The Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 was awarded to Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam, and Steven Weinberg for their contributions to the electroweak unification theory, which relied on the Higgs mechanism as proposed by Peter Higgs. Although Higgs did not share this prize, his theoretical contributions were fundamental to their work.

In 1993, Leon Lederman published the book 'The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?' in which he coined the term 'God Particle' to refer to the Higgs boson. This popularized the search for this particle and brought mainstream media attention to Higgs' work.

In 2004, Peter Higgs was awarded the prestigious Wolf Prize in Physics, recognizing his pioneering work on the Higgs field theory and particle mass generation. The Wolf Prize is considered one of the most prestigious awards in physics and a strong precursor to winning the Nobel Prize.

On July 4, 2012, CERN announced the discovery of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider. This monumental discovery confirmed the existence of the Higgs field and the particle that Peter Higgs theorized nearly five decades earlier, revolutionizing the field of particle physics.

Peter Higgs, along with François Englert, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013 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 experiments at CERN.

In 2015, Peter Higgs was appointed as a Companion of Honour by Queen Elizabeth II for services to Physics, recognizing his extraordinary contributions to the field of particle physics with the discovery and study of the Higgs boson.

In November 2020, Peter Higgs was honored with a Fellowship by the Science Museum in London, celebrating his groundbreaking contributions to theoretical physics and his role in predicting the existence of the Higgs boson, which is a cornerstone of the Standard Model.