One important breakthrough was the development of the unified electromagnetic and weak interaction. Among other ideas, this was based on the concept of broken symmetries and a mechanism for the provision of mass to the otherwise massless vector bosons of the weak interaction, the so-called Higgs mechanism.
The Higgs boson was postulated in 1964, and phenomenological studies of its possible production and decays started in the early 1970s.
The search for the Higgs boson has become the holy grail of all particle accelerators. In the simplest version of the electroweak theory, the Higgs boson serves both to give the W and Z bosons their masses and to give the fermions mass. It is thus a vital part of the theory.
The day July 4, 2012 has been a landmark day in the history of science due to the observation of a new resonance which is most likely to be the elusive Higgs boson announced by CERN. This particle is confirmed on 14th March, 2013, in the ‘Moriond’ conference, held in Italy.
The discovery of the Higgs boson not only represented a scientific breakthrough, it also marked the fulfilment of a fifty-year-old prediction of its discovery. Peter Higgs, from whom the particle’s name is derived, predicted the existence of such a particle using mathematical calculations. He believed that without the existence of such a particle, understanding how the material world is put together would be an impossible feat, as there would be no way to explain why objects have mass.
In October 2013, Peter Higgs and Francois Englert were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for their contributions to the standard model of elementary particle physics and the prediction of the boson named after Higgs.
Elementary particle: Higgs Boson
