Higgs boson: a standalone construct

In 1964 Robert Brout and François Englert, and independently Peter Higgs, proposed a way for fundamental particles to acquire mass: a field that fills all of space keeps a nonzero value even where there is nothing else, and particles gain mass in proportion to how strongly they interact with it. A direct consequence of the theory is that this field must have its own quantum, a particle now called the Higgs boson, where a boson is a particle of the type that can share a state with others and "scalar" means it has no spin, no intrinsic rotation, so it looks the same viewed from any direction. The Higgs boson is the only fundamental scalar particle in the Standard Model, the framework that catalogues the known elementary particles and the forces between them. It was detected in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which each found a new particle near 125 giga-electronvolts in mass whose behaviour matched the prediction, and Englert and Higgs shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for the work. What makes it a landmark is that it supplies the Standard Model's account of where the mass of elementary particles comes from, and it is never seen directly: it survives for only a tiny fraction of a second and is inferred from the lighter particles it decays into.[1][2][3][4]

Unit

A fundamental scalar (spin-0) particle, the quantum excitation of the Higgs field

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified statistically from its decay products in high-energy proton-proton collisions, seen as an excess of events near 125 GeV above the expected background