Peter Ware Higgs
1929–2024, Newcastle upon Tyne, England, Edinburgh, Scotland
British theoretical physicist, eponym of the Higgs boson — the particle conferring mass on elementary particles.
Higgs taught and researched at Edinburgh from 1960. In 1964 he proposed (independently of Brout–Englert and Guralnik–Hagen–Kibble) a mechanism where a scalar field 'condensing' in the vacuum gives gauge bosons mass without breaking gauge symmetry. The accompanying boson was discovered at the LHC in 2012, and he received the Nobel the following year, aged 84.
Nobel-winning work
The Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism (1964) solved the mass problem of the W and Z bosons in electroweak theory: a space-filling field 'slows' them like a viscous medium. The Higgs boson — a 'ripple' of that field — was discovered by ATLAS and CMS at the LHC on 4 July 2012, confirming the Standard Model's final building block.
Workplaces: University of Edinburgh
United Kingdom