2013 Nobel Prize in Physics

The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to François Englert and Peter Higgs. The prize was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on 8 October 2013.

The citation

The citation reads: "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". They share the prize equally.

The laureates

François Englert was born in 1932 in Etterbeek, Belgium, and is affiliated with Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels. Peter Higgs was born in 1929 in Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom, and is affiliated with the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh.

Why it matters

Englert and Higgs, working separately in 1964, proposed a mechanism that gives particles their mass. The particle it predicted, the Higgs boson, was found at CERN in 2012. Higgs was born in Newcastle and has spent most of his career at the University of Edinburgh.

The prize

The prize is worth 8 million Swedish kronor, divided between the laureates. It will be presented at a ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite whose will founded the prizes in 1895.