Nobel Prize—Why Particles Have Mass

Nearly 50 years after its prediction, particle physicists have finally captured the Higgs boson. So the Nobel Committee has awarded this year’s physics prize to two of the theorists who initiated this particle hunt. François Englert of the Free University of Brussels (ULB) and Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh, UK, independently derived a model explaining why particles are not massless, and this model requires the existence of the Higgs boson. Both papers were published in 1964 in Physical Review Letters.

The Higgs boson is the final piece of the standard model of particle physics to be observed, following decades of searching. In June 2012, CERN announced with much fanfare that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva had discovered a particle with the right properties to be the Higgs boson, which signified that researchers had confirmed a fundamental theory of mass.

The Higgs boson does not technically give other particles mass. More precisely, the particle is a quantized manifestation of a field (the Higgs field) that generates mass through its interaction with other particles. But why couldn’t mass just be assumed as a given?