Peter Ware Higgs

Abstract

Peter Higgs attended Cotham Secondary School in Bristol, becoming its second Nobel laureate in physics (the first was Paul Dirac). After undergraduate studies at Kings College, London, followed by research there in theory of helical molecules, he became interested in quantum gravity. In 1960, following a period at University College, London, he moved to University of Edinburgh and focused on quantum field theory and fundamental particle physics. In 1964 he produced two short papers, which showed that prevailing folklore that gauge invariance implied the photon to have zero mass was not a general truth, and he outlined a mechanism that explained how fundamental subatomic particles gain their mass. The mechanism involves a field, now known as the Higgs field, permeating the universe. The interaction of fundamental particles with this field determines their mass. Excitation of this field is manifested in the form of Higgs bosons, whose discovery at CERN in 2012 gave experimental validation of Higgs’ theory. This was recognized in his share of the Nobel Prize for physics (with Francois Englert) in 2013.