Remembering Professor Peter Higgs of Higgs boson fame 

British theoretical physicist Professor Peter Higgs, renowned for predicting mass-giving Higgs’s field in 1964 passed away on 8 April 2024 following a short illness. He was 94.  

It took about half a century before existence of fundamental mass-giving Higgs field could be experimentally confirmed in 2012 when CERN researchers at he Large Hadron Collider (LHC) reported discovery of a new particle, consistent with the Higgs boson.  

Higgs boson, the particle associated with Higgs field behaved exactly the way predicted by the Standard model. The Higgs particle has very short life, of about 10^–22 seconds.   

Higgs field fills entire the Universe. It is responsible for giving mass to all fundamental particles. When the universe began, no particles had mass. Particles gained their mass from the fundamental field associated with the Higgs boson. Stars, planets, life and everything could only emerge because of Higgs boson hence this particle is popularly referred as the god particle.  

Professor Higgs was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013, along with Francois Englert “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider”.  

*** 

Sources: 

1. University of Edinburgh. News – Statement on the death of Professor Peter Higgs. Published on 9 Apr, 2024. Available at https://www.ed.ac.uk/news/2024/statement-on-the-death-of-professor-peter-higgs 

***