Author: Thomas Lohse, chair of EPS HEPPD from 2013-2015

In 1964, Peter Higgs published his famous paper on a self-consistent theory of vector bosons with non-vanishing mass, paving the road towards today’s theory of electroweak interactions of elementary particles. The mass-creation mechanism implied the existence of a new particle, today known as the Higgs boson. This  spin-zero particle is fundamentally different from all other known elementary particles.

For several decades, all experimental efforts to find this new particle were unsuccessful, until in the 1990s precision experiments at highest energy electron positron colliders measured effects consistent with those created by virtual Higgs bosons in quantum fluctuations. Although not yet  an unambiguous discovery, the High Energy Particle Physics Division of the European Physical Society reacted by awarding at the 1997 International Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics in Jerusalem the prestigious EPS HEPP Prize to Peter Higgs, together with Robert Brout and Fraçois Englert, who had independently and almost simultaneously discovered and published the mass-generation mechanism back in 1964.

The indisputable discovery of the Higgs boson, by then the holy grail of elementary particle physics, had to wait for new record energies to be reached at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. In  2012 the ATLAS and CMS experiments independently announced the discovery of a new particle which was subsequently shown to have all the predicted properties of the precious Higgs boson. The European Physical Society reacted promptly and awarded the 2013 EPS HEPP Prize to the two experimental collaborations and three of their leading scientists at the EPS conference which took place in July 2013. Both, François Englert and Peter Higgs joined the conference. Peter Higgs gave a highlight talk – challenging the organizers by using a classical overhead projector – and explained the theoretical developments which allowed him and his colleagues to come up with nothing less than a brilliant break-through for elementary particle physics. Sadly, Robert Brout, who died in 2011, didn’t live to see this historical event. Not unexpectedly, only a few months after the conference, François Englert and Peter Higgs had to return to Stockholm, this time to receiving the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics.

On the 8^th of April 2024, Peter Higgs died in Edinburgh at the age of 94. The elementary particle community has lost a visionary theorist and a very modest and polite friend.

Impressions of the EPS HEP conference with Peter Higgs and François Englert, Stockholm 2013 - image credit: Gina Gunaratnam/EPS