Peter Higgs

Peter Higgs (born May 29, 1929, Newcastle upon Tyne, Northumberland, England—died April 8, 2024, Edinburgh, Scotland) was a British physicist who was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics for proposing the existence of the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle that is the carrier particle of a field that endows all elementary particles with mass through its interactions with them. He shared the prize with Belgian physicist François Englert.

Higgs received a bachelor’s degree (1950), master’s degree (1951), and doctorate (1954) in physics from King’s College, University of London. He was a research fellow (1955–56) at the University of Edinburgh and then a research fellow (1956–58) and lecturer (1959–60) at the University of London. He became a lecturer in mathematical physics at Edinburgh in 1960 and spent the remainder of his career there, becoming a reader in mathematical physics (1970–80) and a professor of theoretical physics (1980–96). He retired in 1996.

Higgs’s earliest work was in molecular physics and concerned calculating the vibrational spectra of molecules. In 1956 he began working in quantum field theory. He wrote two papers in 1964 describing what later became known as the Higgs mechanism, in which a scalar field (that is, a field present at all points in space) gives particles mass. To Higgs’s surprise, the journal to which he submitted the second paper rejected it. When Higgs revised the paper, he made the significant addition that his theory predicted the existence of a heavy boson. (The Higgs mechanism was independently discovered in 1964 by Englert and Belgian physicist Robert Brout and by another group consisting of American physicists Gerald Guralnik and Carl Hagen and British physicist Tom Kibble. However, neither group mentioned the possibility of a massive boson.)

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In the late 1960s American physicist Steven Weinberg and Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam independently incorporated Higgs’s ideas into what later became known as electroweak theory to describe the origin of particle masses. After the discovery of the W and Z particles in 1983, the only remaining part of electroweak theory that needed confirmation was the Higgs field and its boson. Particle physicists searched for the particle for decades, and in July 2012 scientists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN announced, with Higgs in attendance, that they had detected an interesting signal that was likely from a Higgs boson with a mass of 125–126 gigaelectron volts (billion electron volts; GeV). Definitive confirmation that the particle was the Higgs boson was announced in March 2013.

Higgs became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1983. He received many honours for his work, including the Wolf Prize in physics (2004, shared with Brout and Englert), the J.J. Sakurai Prize (2010, shared with Brout, Englert, Guralnik, Hagen, and Kibble), and the Copley Medal of the Royal Society (2015).