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The Higgs boson, predicted by physicist Peter Higgs in 1964 and confirmed by CERN's Large Hadron Collider on July 4, 2012, is the quantum particle associated with the Higgs field — the invisible energy field that permeates all of space. As particles move through this field, they interact with it and acquire mass; without the Higgs field, all particles would be massless and travel at the speed of light.
The discovery required the world's largest machine — the 27-kilometer LHC tunnel beneath the Swiss-French border — running at nearly the speed of light for years, generating collision data analyzed by thousands of physicists. Peter Higgs and François Englert won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for the prediction.
# Top 10 Higgs Boson facts
- 1The Higgs boson was predicted 48 years before it was discovered
- 2Finding it required the world's largest machine — the 27 km Large Hadron Collider
- 3Without the Higgs field, all particles would be massless and atoms could not form
Fascinating Facts
- ◆The Higgs boson was predicted 48 years before it was discovered
- ◆Finding it required the world's largest machine — the 27 km Large Hadron Collider
- ◆Without the Higgs field, all particles would be massless and atoms could not form
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