Peter Higgs

Peter Higgs (1929–2024) was a British theoretical physicist who independently proposed a mechanism by which particles acquire mass through interaction with a field, predicting a massive boson.

François Englert: Belgian theoretical physicist who independently proposed a field-based mechanism for generating particle masses. Englert coauthored the 1964 paper that presented the mechanism independently of Higgs’s work.
Higgs mechanism: A process in which interactions with a nonzero scalar field give mass to elementary particles while preserving gauge-theory consistency. This mechanism is the central theoretical contribution associated with Higgs’s name.
1964 papers on the Higgs mechanism: A set of papers that independently developed a mechanism linking spontaneous symmetry breaking to massive gauge bosons. Higgs’s proposal appeared in this sequence of independent theoretical papers.
Large Hadron Collider: A particle accelerator at CERN that collides protons and heavy ions at high energies. Its experiments produced the collisions in which the Higgs boson was observed.
Robert Brout: Belgian-American theoretical physicist who developed the particle-mass mechanism with François Englert. Brout and Englert published their account shortly before Higgs’s paper in 1964.
Higgs field: A scalar field present throughout space whose nonzero vacuum value contributes to the masses of certain elementary particles. The proposed mechanism gives particles mass through their interactions with this field.
Nambu–Goldstone theorem: A theorem predicting massless modes when a continuous global symmetry is spontaneously broken. The 1964 work addressed how gauge theories could avoid the theorem’s unwanted massless particles.
ATLAS experiment: A general-purpose particle detector at the Large Hadron Collider. ATLAS independently reported evidence for the new boson in 2012.
Gerald Guralnik: American theoretical physicist who coauthored a 1964 paper on symmetry breaking and particle masses. Guralnik’s independent work with Dick Hagen and Tom Kibble formed another central version of the mechanism.
Higgs boson: An elementary scalar particle associated with excitations of the Higgs field. The mechanism predicts this particle, whose discovery provided an experimental test of the theory.

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