Higgs Mechanism

The Higgs mechanism explains how certain fundamental particles acquire mass through their interaction with a field, now called the Higgs field, that fills the universe; without it, the Standard Model's force-carrying particles would have to be massless, contradicting experiment. Three papers proposed it independently within months of each other in 1964: Robert Brout and Francois Englert in August, Peter Higgs in August and then a fuller version in September after a first submission was rejected by CERN's own journal, and Gerald Guralnik, C. R. Hagen and Tom Kibble in November, the last also credited with a genuinely independent contribution the field itself recognises even though no prize named them. It is sometimes called the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism for this reason. The mechanism predicted a further, detectable particle, the Higgs boson, not confirmed until the Large Hadron Collider observation of 2012, 48 years later. The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Englert and Higgs alone, "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"; Brout, who could have shared it with his own co-author Englert, had died on 3 May 2011, and the Nobel Prize is never awarded posthumously. Higgs said afterward he thought the two-name prize implicitly recognised Brout as the third who could not be included.