Peter Higgs
British theoretical physicist (1929–2024) / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Peter Ware Higgs CH FRS FRSE HonFInstP (29 May 1929 – 8 April 2024) was a British theoretical physicist, professor at the University of Edinburgh,[7][8] and Nobel laureate in Physics for his work on the mass of subatomic particles.[9][10]
Peter Higgs | |
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Born | Peter Ware Higgs (1929-05-29)29 May 1929 Newcastle upon Tyne, England |
Died | 8 April 2024(2024-04-08) (aged 94) Edinburgh, Scotland |
Alma mater | King's College London (BSc, MSc, PhD) |
Known for | |
Spouse |
Jody Williamson
(m. 1963; div. 1972) |
Children | 2 |
Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Fields | Theoretical physics |
Institutions |
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Thesis | Some problems in the theory of molecular vibrations (1954) |
Doctoral advisors | Charles Coulson[1][2] Christopher Longuet-Higgins[1][3] |
Doctoral students | |
Website | www |
Signature | |
In 1964, Higgs was the single author of one of the three milestone papers published in Physical Review Letters (PRL) that proposed that spontaneous symmetry breaking in electroweak theory could explain the origin of mass of elementary particles in general and of the W and Z bosons in particular. This Higgs mechanism predicted the existence of a new particle, the Higgs boson, the detection of which became one of the great goals of physics.[11][12] In 2012, CERN announced the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider.[13] The Higgs mechanism is generally accepted as an important ingredient in the Standard Model of particle physics, without which certain particles would have no mass.[14]
For this work, Higgs received the Nobel Prize in Physics, which he shared with François Englert in 2013.[15]