Peter Higgs (Britain) and Francois Englert (Belgium) have been jointed awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2013 for “the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider”.

In 1964, Francois Englert, Peter Higgs and Robert Brout (who died in 2011), had independently published their work, describing a mechanism making use of particle physics.

Later, the particle was named as Higgs Boson, whose existence was confirmed at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva last year. The Higgs Boson was detected for the first time on July 4, 2012.