Higgs boson and the origin of particle mass

Settled in 2012 by ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

In 1964 several theorists independently proposed a mechanism by which a symmetry-breaking scalar field could give mass to force-carrying particles while keeping the underlying theory gauge-invariant, predicting a new massive boson as a signature. After a decades-long, multi-billion-dollar search, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC jointly announced discovery of a 125 GeV particle consistent with the Higgs boson on July 4, 2012, and Higgs and Englert won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics. Subsequent measurements of its couplings and spin have continued to match Standard Model predictions closely.

A single field filling all of empty space is the reason anything in the universe has resistance to acceleration at all, and it took theorists 48 years to see it directly.

Explanations that circulated

• That the Higgs field is what gives ALL mass to matter — it accounts for the mass of fundamental particles (quarks, leptons, W/Z bosons), but most of the mass of everyday matter (protons, neutrons, atoms) comes from the strong-force binding energy inside nucleons, not directly from the Higgs mechanism

References

• Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC, ATLAS Collaboration, Physics Letters B, 2012
• Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC, CMS Collaboration, Physics Letters B, 2012