In announcing the award on Tuesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited Drs. Englert and Higgs for their work on what has become known as the Brout-Englert-Higgs field and its related particle, the Higgs boson.
In 1964, Englert and his colleague, the late Robert Brout, proposed that space was permeated by a field that imparted mass to particles moving through it. A particle’s mass depended on how strongly it interacted with this field – the stronger the interaction, the more massive the particle.
Higgs offered a similar explanation and predicted that the field would have a particle associated with it. The particle became known as the Higgs boson. The prediction triggered a nearly 50-year quest among experimental physicists to find the particle.
Find it they did. On July 4, 2012, two international teams of physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research announced that they had discovered the particle at the facility’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Last March, the teams announced a higher level of confidence in their detection based on additional data their cathedral-scale detectors at the collider had amassed in the interim.