Analysis for Science Librarians of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics: Broken Symmetry and the BEH Mechanism

Abstract

On October 8, 2013, the Royal Swedish Academy of Science announced that the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2013 would go to Peter W. Higgs (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom) and François Englert (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium). Forty-nine years ago, these two scientists developed a theory to explain the origin of mass in the universe, and it forms the basis for our understanding of particles. Their theory sparked a decades-long experimentalist search for confirmation, which culminated on July 4, 2012, when the discovery of a fundamental particle at the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN was announced. The discovered particle shared a substantial number of properties with Higgs and Englert’s predictions.

KEYWORDS:

• Nobel Prize in Physics 2013
• physics
• particle physics
• Higgs boson
• BEH mechanism
• François Englert
• Peter W. Higgs