Higgs boson discovery pair win Nobel Prize

The scientists who first proposed the particle that explains the universe, Peter Higgs and François Englert, have shared the Nobel Prize in physics.

Though first outlined nearly 50 years ago, Higgs boson's existence was only proven last year by the Geneva-based Large Hadron Collider in an experiment that involved some 6000 scientists, cost millions of dollars and required billions of particle collisions.

Dr Higgs, 84, of the University of Edinburgh, and Dr Englert, 80, a Belgian, published their landmark 1964 paper with colleague Robert Brout, who died in 2011.

The Nobel Prize in physics is the world’s highest award in this scientific discipline and comes with an eight million Swedish kronor ($US1.25 million) cash award from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. But only Drs Higgs and Englert get the prize as it is not awarded posthumously.

Nor could it be awarded to the many other scientists who worked on the project as only a maximum of three co-winners is allowed.

Higgs boson explained
Higgs boson explains a big puzzle about matter concerning why some objects in the universe such as the quark, a constituent of protons, possess mass, while others, such as the photon, a constituent of light, have only energy and zip around the universe unhindered, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Until this enigma was resolved, physicists couldn't properly explain why many things in the universe exist, from stars and planets to germs and people.

Dr Higgs and others explained away the problem by proposing a ghostlike field that pervades the universe – space, after all, is already filled with other invisible fields, such as the gravitational field and electromagnetic field.

The scientists' notion was that particles acquire mass only in contact with this field, which would become known as the Higgs field. How much mass they acquire depends on the type of particles they are. Some, like the photon, seem to ignore the field and don't acquire mass at all.

By contrast, electrons interact with the field. If the field were to disappear, the suddenly massless electrons would zoom away at the speed of light – and all matter would collapse.

The pair's work was confirmed in July last year in a nail-biting experiment undertaken at the atom-smashing machine built by the European particle physics laboratory at CERN in Geneva, where Drs Higgs and Englert met for the first time.

After further analysis, CERN physicists said earlier this year they were confident that the particle they had discovered was in fact the one Dr Higgs and his colleagues had predicted.