Which particle was discovered at CERN in 2012 and confirmed the Higgs field?

The Higgs boson was discovered at CERN in 2012, confirming the existence of the Higgs field.

The ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider independently reported a new particle with a mass near 125 gigaelectronvolts. Its observed properties matched the Higgs boson predicted by the electroweak theory.

The Higgs field is present throughout space. Elementary particles interacting with it acquire mass through the Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism. The Higgs boson is an excitation of that field, much as a photon is an excitation of the electromagnetic field.

The discovery completed the particle content predicted by the Standard Model, but it did not explain every source of mass. Most of the mass of ordinary protons and neutrons comes from strong-interaction energy inside them rather than directly from Higgs interactions. The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics honored François Englert and Peter Higgs for the mechanism.