Higgs boson work leads to one Nobel Prize. Could there be another?

Sifting through the debris of some 2,000 trillion collisions at the accelerator – an underground race-track for protons accelerated to nearly the speed of light – researchers uncovered evidence for 1,500 Higgs bosons fleetingly created by the collisions.

“I am overwhelmed to receive this award and thank the Royal Academy,” Higgs said in a prepared statement issued by the University of Edinburgh, where he is a professor emeritus.

In issuing the award, the Academy used a unique turn of phrase that suggested to some that the body might be open to issuing another prize at some point for the discovery of the Higgs boson.

The Academy noted that the prize was “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles,” and went on to mention the work at CERN confirming Higgs’s prediction.

“The term ‘theoretical’ has never been used before with discovery,” observes Lawrence Sulak, a physicist at Boston University whose team contributed key instruments for one of the two massive detectors at the LHC, known as the CMS detector

This could leave the door open for “a future prize for the actual experimental discovery,” he wrote in an e-mail.

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