Physics nobel 2013
Nobel Prize in Physics 2013
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Higgs boson, key to the universe, wins Nobel physics
prize
STOCKHOLM | Tue Oct 8, 2013 7:44pm
EDT
(Reuters) - Britain's Peter Higgs
and Francois Englert of Belgium won the Nobel Prize for physics on Tuesday for
predicting the existence of the Higgs boson particle that explains how
elementary matter attained the mass to form stars and planets.
The insight has been hailed as one
of the most important in the understanding of the cosmos. Without the Higgs
mechanism all particles would travel at the speed of light and atoms would not
exist.
Half a century after the scientists'
original prediction, the new building block of nature was finally detected in
2012 at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) centre's giant,
underground particle-smasher near Geneva.
"I am overwhelmed to receive
this award," said Higgs, who is known to shun the limelight and did not
appear in public on Tuesday despite winning the world's top science prize.
"I hope this recognition of
fundamental science will help raise awareness of the value of blue-sky
research," he said in a statement via the University of Edinburgh where he
works.
The two scientists had been
favorites to share the 8 million Swedish crown ($1.25 million) prize after
their theoretical work was vindicated by the CERN experiments.
To find the elusive particle,
scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) had to pore over data from the
wreckage of trillions of sub-atomic proton collisions.
The Higgs boson is the last piece of
the Standard Model of physics that describes the fundamental make-up of the
universe. Some commentators - though not scientists - have called it the
"God particle", for its role in turning the Big Bang into an ordered
cosmos.
Higgs' and Englert's work shows how
elementary particles inside atoms gain mass by interacting with an invisible
field pervading all of space - and the more they interact, the heavier they
become. The particle associated with the field is the Higgs boson.
The Royal Swedish Academy of
Sciences said the prize went to Higgs and Englert for work fundamental to
describing how the universe is constructed.
"According to the Standard
Model, everything, from flowers and people to stars and planets, consists of
just a few building blocks: matter particles."
REMAINING QUESTIONS
Although finding the Higgs boson is
a remarkable achievement - and one which Higgs once said he never expected to
see in his lifetime - it is not the end of the story for physicists trying to
understand the structure of the universe.
Scientists are now grappling with
other mysteries such as understanding the nature of dark matter, which accounts
for more than a quarter of the universe, and dark energy, which is believed to
be the driver of cosmic expansion.
Asked how it felt to be a Nobel
winner, Englert told reporters by phone link to Stockholm: "You may
imagine that this is not very unpleasant, of course. I am very, very happy to
have the recognition of this extraordinary award."
CERN Director General Rolf Heuer
said he was "thrilled" that the Nobel prize had gone to particle
physics. He said the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN last year marked
"the culmination of decades of intellectual effort by many people around
the world".
Some physicists were surprised that
there was no recognition for the CERN teams that discovered the new particle,
since there had been speculation of a prize for CERN as an institution.
The will of Swedish dynamite
millionaire Alfred Nobel limits the award to a maximum of three people -
harking back to an earlier era when science was conducted by individuals or
very small teams.
However, thousands worked on
detecting the particle at CERN and a total of six scientists published relevant
papers in 1964.
Englert, 80, and his colleague
Robert Brout - who died in 2011 - were first to publish; but the now 84-year-old
Higgs followed just a couple of weeks later and was the first to explicitly
predict the existence of a new particle.
Similar proposals from American
researchers Carl Hagen and Gerald Guralnik and Britain's Tom Kibble appeared
shortly afterwards.
Kibble said it was no surprise that
he and his colleagues were not included in the Nobel honor since "our
paper was unquestionably the last of the three to be published in Physical
Review Letters in 1964 - though we naturally regard our treatment as the most
thorough and complete".
(Additional reporting by Mia Shanley
and Niklas Pollard in Stockholm, Ben Hirschler in London and Robert Evans in
Geneva; Editing by Alistair Scrutton, Kate Kelland and Ralph Boulton)
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