The Higgs Boson Particle

The Higgs boson is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics produced by the quantum excitation of the Higgs field,one of the fields in particle physics theory.In the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a massive scalar boson with zero spin, no electric charge, and no colour charge. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately. It is named after physicist Peter Higgs, who in 1964 along with five other scientists proposed the Higgs mechanism to explain why some particles have mass. (Particles acquire mass in several ways, but a full explanation for all particles had been extremely difficult.) This mechanism required that a spinless particle known as a scalar boson should exist with properties as described by the Higgs Mechanism theory.

This particle was called the Higgs boson. In 2012, a subatomic particle with the expected properties was discovered by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. The new particle was subsequently confirmed to match the expected properties of a Higgs boson. On 10 December 2013, two of the physicists, Peter Higgs and François Englert, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their theoretical predictions.

Although Higgs's name has come to be associated with this theory (the Higgs mechanism), several researchers between about 1960 and 1972 independently developed different parts of it. In the mainstream media, the Higgs boson has often been called the "God particle" from the 1993 book The God Particle by Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman,[9] although the nickname is not endorsed by many physicists.