You might not have noticed it, but Peter Higgs passed away at the age of 94. If you don’t know who Peter Higgs is, you might remember the discovery of the Higgs Boson by the Large Hadron Collider back in 2012. The Higgs (the boson and not Peter), also known as the “god particle”, was the last piece of the Standard Model of Particle Physics to be found. The particle is attributed to Peter (hence the name), but the theory behind it was set forth in three papers published in 1964 (Robert Brout and Francois Englert), Peter Higgs, and (Gerald Guralnik, Carl Richard Hagen, and Tom Kibble). After the discovery, Peter Higgs and Francois Englert were awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Some Reading
- The Associate Press. Peter Higgs, who proposed the existence of the so-called ‘God particle,’ has died. NPR. April 9, 2024.
- Dennis Overbye. “Peter Higgs, Nobelist Who Predicted the ‘God Particle,’ Dies at 94.” New York Times. April 9, 2024.
- Betsy Reed. “Peter Higgs obituary.” The Guardian. April 9, 2024.
- Georgina Rannard. “Peter Higgs obituary: the shy man who changed our understanding of the Universe.” BBC. April 9, 2024.
Technical Reading
- F. Englert and R. Brout. “Broken Symmetry and the Mass of Gauge Vector Mesons.” Physical Review Letters. Volume 13, 321. August 31, 1964. https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.13.321
- Peter W. Higgs. “Broken Symmetries and the Masses of Gauge Bosons.” Physical Review Letters. Volume 13, 508. October 19, 1964. https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.13.508
- G. S. Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, and T. W. B. Kibble. “Global Conservation Laws and Massless Particles.”
Physical Review Letters. Volume 13, 585. November 16, 1964. https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.13.585 - ATLAS Collaboration. “Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC.” Physics Letters B. Volume 716, Issue 1. Pages 1-29. September 17, 2012. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037026931200857X
- CMS Collaboration. “Observation of a new boson at a mass of 126 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC.” Physics Letters B. Volume 716, Issue 1. Pages 30-61. September 17, 2012. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370269312008581
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