Higgs Boson Physicists Win Nobel Prize in Physics 2013

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs, the Higgs Boson physicists, “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 ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider”.

The Higgs Boson was finally detected in 2012 at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) centre’s giant, underground particle-collider near Geneva.

The two scientists had been favorites to share the 8 million Swedish crown ($1.25 million) prize after their theoretical work was vindicated by the CERN experiments.

The Higgs boson is the last piece of the Standard Model of physics that describes the fundamental make-up of the universe. Some commentators – though not scientists – have called it the “God particle”, for its role in turning the Big Bang into an ordered cosmos.