An additional award would be a challenge, others observe. Under the Nobel rules, an award can go to no more than three living people, while the collaborations for each of the two detectors consisted of roughly 3,000 researchers each.
With those kinds of numbers, “it becomes extremely difficult to point to three people,” says Don Lincoln, a physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., and another collaborator on CMS.
Still, he says he suspects that over the years, “the Swedish Academy of Sciences will recognize the fact science is getting big, so maybe they can apportion credit to groups,” as the Nobel Peace Prize does.
Even if no similar recognition for experimentalists results from this stage of exploring the Higgs boson, the future is big with promise, researchers say.
Physicists say they have every indication so far that the particle discovered last year is the Higgs. “But we are not yet confident,” Dr. Sulak cautions.
This means that even though a Nobel prize has been awarded for the theory describing the Higgs phenomenon, questions still swirl around the particle associated with the Higgs field.