CERN congratulates Englert, Higgs on Nobel in physics

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The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) on Tuesday congratulated Francois Englert and Peter Higgs on the award of the Nobel prize in physics.

The two scientists were awarded with the prize "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."

CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer said he was thrilled that this year's Nobel prize has gone to particle physics.

"The discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN last year, which validates the Brout-Englert-Higgs echanism, marks the culmination of decades of intellectual effort by many people around the world," he said.

The Brout-Englert-Higgs (BEH) mechanism was first proposed in 1964 in two papers published independently, the first by Belgian physicists Robert Brout and Francois Englert, and the second by British physicist Peter Higgs.

It explains how the force responsible for beta decay is much weaker than electromagnetism, but is better known as the mechanism that endows fundamental particles with mass.

A third paper, published by Americans Gerald Guralnik and Carl Hagen with their British colleague Tom Kibble further contributed to the development of the new idea, which now forms an essential part of the Standard Model of particle physics.

As was pointed out by Higgs, a key prediction of the idea is the existence of a massive boson of a new type, which was discovered by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN in 2012.

CERN announced that CMS and ATLAS have observed a new particle consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson, a theorised sub-atomic particle believed to confer mass, on July 4 2012.

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