CERN Discovers the Higgs Boson
A 17-mile ring under the Swiss-French border finds the particle that explains why anything has mass
Quick facts
- Announced
- 4 July 2012, CERN
- Mass
- c. 125 GeV
- Detectors
- ATLAS and CMS, Large Hadron Collider
- Nobel recognition
- 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics, Englert and Higgs
What happened
On 4 July 2012, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN's Large Hadron Collider announced they had independently observed a new particle in the mass region of around 125 GeV, a particle consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson. CERN's own physics pages describe the particle's key confirming properties: it had no electrical charge, it was short-lived, and it decayed in ways that the Higgs boson should, according to theory. Physicists had spent nearly five decades searching for the particle since its existence was first proposed in 1964 by theorists including Peter Higgs and Francois Englert, who argued that an invisible field permeating all of space gives elementary particles their mass. By examining two and a half times more data than they had at the July announcement, CERN reports, the two teams concluded in March 2013 that some kind of Higgs boson had indeed been discovered, confirming the mechanism directly.
Why it matters
The Higgs boson was the last undiscovered particle predicted by the Standard Model, and its detection completed the model's decades-long list of experimentally confirmed predictions. On 8 October 2013, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded jointly to Francois Englert and Peter Higgs for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, a discovery the Nobel citation explicitly says was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.
How we know
The July 2012 discovery announcement and the March 2013 confirmation were both published directly by CERN based on data collected by the ATLAS and CMS detectors at the Large Hadron Collider, two independently built and operated experiments whose separate analyses of billions of proton collisions produced matching results.
Sources
- CERN. The Higgs boson · Primary source (author-declared)home.cern · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- ATLAS Experiment, CERN. The Higgs boson: a landmark discovery · Primary source (author-declared)atlas.cern · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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