CERN announced the discovery of the Higgs boson
On this day · 4 July 2012
After a half-century hunt, two CERN teams unveiled the particle that explains why matter has mass.
On 4 July 2012, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations announced to a packed auditorium at CERN that they had found a new particle. Both experiments at the Large Hadron Collider had independently spotted a signal near 125 GeV, and each had reached the 5-sigma threshold that particle physicists treat as the standard for a discovery.
The particle was the long-sought Higgs boson, first predicted in 1964. It is the visible trace of the Higgs field, the mechanism that gives fundamental particles their mass. Confirming it filled the last missing piece of the Standard Model of particle physics.
A particle is heavier the more strongly it feels the Higgs field; without it, the universe would look nothing like the one we know.
The result was the payoff of a decades-long search and a machine built specifically to chase it. The following year, Peter Higgs and François Englert shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for the theory the data had finally vindicated.
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