1996, Italian physicist Peter Higgs
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Groundbreaking theoretical physicist Peter Higgs has died at the age of 94. Higgs’ work, which explained how elementary particles acquire mass, won the Nobel Prize in 2013 and became a key element of the Standard Model of particle physics. He passed away on April 8th at his home in Edinburgh, England, after a short illness.
In 1964, while working as a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, Higgs made a prediction that would have a huge impact on the world of physics. He postulated that the existence of a field filling the universe gives particles mass immediately after the universe. big bang. This field would later be associated with a unique particle named the Higgs boson.
The Higgs boson became the basis of the Standard Model of particle physics, and came to be called the “God Particle.” Higgs himself called the nickname “an unfortunate mix of theoretical physics and bad theology” in a 2017 interview. new scientist.
After years of searching for evidence of the Higgs boson, it was finally discovered in 2012 at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Switzerland. A year later, the Higgs boson won him the Nobel Prize, one of the many awards and honors he has received for his research.
The discovery of the Higgs boson is commonly cited as the Large Hadron Collider’s most important achievement, but it also marked the beginning of a strange era in particle physics. Now that we’ve found all the particles predicted by the Standard Model, what happens next? Higgs himself could use a collider to link particle physics with cosmology and the search for dark matter. I was hoping that would happen, but those questions remain unanswered.
After retiring in 1996, Higgs continued to attend physics conferences and collaborate with colleagues and students. He often talked about supersymmetry, a framework in physics in which each known particle has a corresponding partner with a different spin. If we live in a supersymmetric universe, many more particles should be discovered.
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