Peter Higgs - Definition and Overview

Peter Ware Higgs (born May 29, 1929), FRSE, FRS, until recently held a personal chair in theoretical physics at the University of Edinburgh and is now an emeritus professor.

Higgs is best known for his 1960s proposal of broken symmetry in electroweak theory, explaining the origin of mass of elementary particles in general and of the W and Z bosons in particular. This so-called Higgs mechanism predicts the existence of a new particle, the Higgs boson. Although this particle has not turned up in accelerator experiments so far, the Higgs mechanism is generally accepted as an important ingredient in Standard Model of particle physics. Higgs conceived of the mechanism in 1964 while walking the Cairngorms, and returned to his lab declaring he had had his "one big idea".

Peter Higgs has been awarded a number of prizes in recognition of his work, including the Dirac Medal and Prize for outstanding contributions to theoretical physics from the Institute of Physics, the 1997 High Energy and Particle Physics Prize by the European Physical Society, and the 2004 Wolf Prize in Physics.

External links

• A photograph of Peter Higgs (http://hepweb.rl.ac.uk/ppUKpics/POW/pr_000105.html)
• Peter Higgs: the man behind the boson (http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/17/7/6) - An article in the PhysicsWeb about Peter Higgs
• Higgs v Hawking: a battle of the heavyweights that has shaken the world of theoretical physics (http://millennium-debate.org/ind3sept023.htm) - An article on the debate between Peter Higgs and Stephen Hawking about the existence of the Higgs boson
• My Life as a Boson (http://wlap.physics.lsa.umich.edu/umich/mctp/conf/2001/sto2001/higgs/) - A Lecture by Peter Higgs available in various formats