Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider revealed data from two independent experiments, ATLAS and CMS, showing a new particle at roughly 125 GeV consistent with the Higgs boson predicted in 1964. The discovery capped a nearly 50-year search and validated the Standard Model of particle physics.
The announcement came at a packed seminar at CERN near Geneva, with physicist Peter Higgs, then 83 and visibly moved, sitting in the audience as decades of theoretical work were finally confirmed. Rolf Heuer, CERN's director general, delivered the understated verdict: 'I think we have it,' prompting a standing ovation and, for some scientists, tears.
The Higgs boson had been proposed in 1964 by Higgs and, independently, by Belgian physicists François Englert and Robert Brout, as the particle associated with a field that gives other particles their mass. Without it, electrons and quarks would be massless and atoms could never form; the universe as we know it simply wouldn't exist.
Finding it required building the Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile ring of superconducting magnets beneath the Franco-Swiss border, smashing protons together at nearly the speed of light billions of times, and sifting through the wreckage for a needle-in-a-haystack signal. Higgs and Englert shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics; Brout had died in 2011 and so missed both the confirmation and the prize.
Key people: Peter Higgs, François Englert, Rolf Heuer