Nobel Prize-winning British physicist Petter Higgs dies at age 94

The renowned British physicist Peter Higgs, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013, passed away last Monday (8), aged 94, as announced by the University of Edinburgh this Tuesday (9).

The institution reported that Higgs died peacefully at home the previous day after a brief illness. Higgs gained recognition for his prediction of the existence of a new particle, the famous “Higgs boson”, in 1964. However, it took almost half a century before the existence of this particle could be confirmed at the Large Hadron Collider.

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_{In 2013, the Briton won the Nobel Prize in physics (Photo: reproduction/Jeff J Mitchell/GettyImages Embed)}

Great recognition in the world of physics

The same theory was presented by a physicist from Belgium, François Englert, with whom Higgs shared the prize in 2013 and the value of 1.2 million dollars for the discovery. The recognition for proving the theory came a year after an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider confirmed the existence of the boson.

In the “Standard Model” of particle physics, the Higgs Boson theory is one of the fundamental pillars, as this model describes elementary particles and their interactions.

Peter Higgs described the last particle, proposing the existence of a particle responsible for a field that gives mass to the particles that make up matter. The “Higgs Boson” is also known as the “God particle”.

Large Hadron Collider

The search for the “Higgs Boson” was not easy. It took researchers almost 50 years to receive the Nobel Prize because it was only in 2012 that it was possible to prove that they were correct, as this particle is invisible and its existence needed to be investigated indirectly. It was necessary to build the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator with a 27-kilometer tube that stretches between the border territories between France and Switzerland.

Scientists have caused atom nuclei to collide at high speeds. After achieving this separation, the researchers were able to detect a trace of the “Higgs Boson”.

Featured Photo: Peter Higgs proved his “Higgs boson” theory (Reproduction/Leonardo Cendamo/GettyImages Embed)