Physicists Peter Higgs (United Kingdom) and François Englert (Belgium), together with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), have been awarded today with thePrince of Asturias Award for Scientific and Technical Research 2013.
The awarded physicists formulated in 1964, at the same time and independently, the existence of the subatomic particle at the origin of the mass, which has been baptized as“Higgs boson” or “scalar boson”. The publication of the works of Englert and the late Robert Brout, on the one hand, and Higgs, on the other, describing the mechanism of symmetry breaking in the field of quantum field theory, was a milestone and provided a key element to complete the Standard Model of particle physics – the periodic table of the subatomic world and its rules, which explain how the universe works.
Almost 50 years later, on March 30, 2010, CERN scientists accomplished what was then considered the world’s largest scientific experiment:the collision, for the first time, of beams of protons previously accelerated to an energy of 7 teravolts (TeV), inside the Large Hadron Collider or LHC, recreating conditions similar to those that existed when the Big Bang originated. The creation of the first antimatter particle at the LHC was the confirmation of physical theories currently being worked on, such as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and the understanding of the formation of the universe. These findings made it possible to demonstrate in 2012, after half a century of speculation,the existence of the so-called Higgs boson or “God particle”, in addition to completing the Standard Model of particle physics, that is, the periodic table of the subatomic world and its rules, which explain how the universe works.
The find, which has been considered the greatest discovery in the history of understanding nature, allows us to peer into the observation of what happened immediately after the Big Bang.
