The Higgs boson
Bosón de Higgs
- Date
- 2012 · confidence high
- Place
- CERN, Geneva, Switzerland (LHC, ATLAS and CMS experiments)
- Credited to
- ATLAS and CMS Collaborations (CERN); Peter Higgs; François Englert
- People
- 👤 François Englert1932–2026👤 Peter Higgs1929–2024
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
What was discovered
On 4 July 2012 ATLAS and CMS announce a new particle of 125 GeV that decays into two photons and into four leptons, with the properties of the scalar boson predicted in 1964. It confirms the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles and completes the standard model.
A discovery with over 6,000 authors per experiment; it remains 'compatible with the standard model' in every measurement up to 2026.
What it led to
- Complete standard model
- Measurements of Higgs couplings and vacuum physics
- Future collider projects (FCC, ILC)
- 2013 Nobel Prize for Higgs and Englert
Built on
- Goldstone boson1960
- Higgs mechanism1964
- Electroweak unification1961-1968
- Electroweak theory
- LHC (2008) and the LEP and Tevatron searches
Made possible
- Distributed computing (the Grid) and large-scale detectors
- LHC superconducting magnet technologies