The discovery of the Higgs boson was announced in 2012 at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
On 4 July 2012, the ATLAS and CMS experiments announced that they had independently observed a previously unknown boson with a mass near 125–126 GeV. Both experiments operated at the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, located at CERN near Geneva on the Swiss-French border.
The new particle showed properties consistent with the Higgs boson, which had been predicted by theories proposed in the 1960s. The Higgs field is important because interactions with it help explain why many elementary particles have mass. Scientists initially used cautious language because further measurements were needed to confirm the particle’s identity.
CERN announced confirmation in March 2013 after additional analysis showed that the particle’s spin, parity, interactions, and decay patterns matched the Standard Model Higgs boson. Peter Higgs and François Englert, whose theoretical work helped predict the mechanism, received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics. Fermilab also searched for the particle, but the 2012 announcement came from CERN’s LHC experiments.