Almost 50 years ago, three nearly simultaneous papers independently laid the theoretical foundations for what would come to be known as the Higgs mechanism.1 In the standard model of particle physics, the mechanism calls for a scalar field, embodied by a spin-0 particle, that interacts with other fundamental particles and thereby endows them with mass. The Higgs boson was the last remaining unobserved particle predicted by the standard model.
On 4 July the leaders of the CMS and ATLAS collaborations at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) announced the discovery of a new particle with Higgs-like properties at a mass of 125 GeV.2,3 Figure 1 shows the new particle in relation to other known fundamental particles. Seven months previously, the teams had seen tantalizing hints of such a particle (see Physics Today, February 2012, page 16). Since then, they’ve doubled their data and achieved the...
