The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter Higgs "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."
François Englert is a Belgian theoretical physicist and professor emeritus at the Université libre de Bruxelles. Peter Higgs is a British theoretical physicist and professor emeritus at the University of Edinburgh. Together, they proposed the existence of the Higgs boson in the 1960s, which is a crucial component of the Standard Model of particle physics.
The Higgs boson is a fundamental particle that is responsible for giving mass to other particles through the Higgs mechanism. Its discovery confirms the Standard Model of particle physics and provides a deeper understanding of the fundamental building blocks of the universe.
The Higgs boson was discovered in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. This was achieved by colliding protons at high energies and analyzing the resulting particle interactions. The discovery was announced on July 4, 2012.
The discovery of the Higgs boson has had a significant impact on the scientific community, as it confirms decades of theoretical work and provides a deeper understanding of the fundamental forces and particles in the universe. It has also opened up new avenues for research and has the potential to lead to groundbreaking discoveries in the future.