Peter Higgs

Peter Ware Higgs, CH, FRS, FRSE (English: Peter Ware Higgs, May 29, 1929 - April 8, 2024), British theoretical physicist, emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh. He is world-famous for the Higgs mechanism and the Higgs particle. Peter Higgs was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. He graduated from King's College London in 1960 and taught at the University of Edinburgh from 1960 to 1996. On July 4, 2012, CERN announced that the LHC's compact muon coil detected a new particle with a mass of 125.3±0.6 GeV (exceeding the background expectation by 4.9 standard deviations), and the torus instrument measured a new particle with a mass of 126.5 GeV. On March 14, 2013, CERN issued a press release stating that the previously detected new particle was the Higgs boson. The Higgs mechanism is widely regarded as an important theoretical basis for the Standard Model of particle physics. Peter Higgs has received many awards, including the Dirac Medal and the British Physical Society Outstanding Contribution to Theoretical Physics Award in 1997, the Wolf Prize in Physics in 2004, and the Sakurai Prize in 2010. In 2013, Higgs and Francois Engler were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for "the theory of the mass generation mechanism of subatomic particles, which has advanced human understanding in this regard and has recently been confirmed by the discovery of elementary particles by the torus instrument and the compact muon coil detector of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN."