It was 60 years ago when Higgs first suggested how an elementary particle of unusual properties could pervade the universe in the form of an invisible field, giving other elementary particles their masses. Several other physicists independently thought of this mechanism around the same time, including Francois Englert, now at the Free University of Brussels. The particle was a crucial element of the theoretical edifice that physicists were building in those years,which later became known as the standard model of particles and fields. Two separate experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland ' ATLAS and the CMS ' confirmed Higgs' predictions when they announced the discovery of the Higgs boson half a century later. It was the last missing component of the standard model, and Higgs and Englert shared a Nobel Prize in 2013 for predicting its existence. Physicists at the LHC continue to learn about the properties of the Higgs boson, but some researchers say...
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