The British physicist Peter Higgs, awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2013 for predicting the existence of the so-called "God particle" , the Higgs boson, has died at the age of 94, after a short illness. thanks to which all other particles can have mass. This was announced by the University of Edinburgh.
The Higgs boson is considered the cornerstone of the reference theory of contemporary physics, called the Standard Model. Its existence was independently theorized by Peter Higgs and Francois Englert in 1964 (and for this they were both awarded the Nobel Prize in 2013).
After the publication of the theory, the "hunt" for the particle by experimental physicists began. Confirmation of its existence came almost half a century later, in 2012, thanks to experiments conducted at Cern in Geneva CMS and Atlas, led at the time by the Italians Guido Tonelli and Fabiola Gianotti, of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (Infn).
(Unioneonline/D)