Chris Quigg · Physicist

… was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs “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.”  Scientific Background on the Nobel Prize in Physics 2013.
Nobel Lectures video.

Several of the leading actors in the discovery of spontaneous gauge symmetry breaking as an origin of particle mass have described their personal involvement. Their words carry a special fascination.

Interview with Philip Anderson by Alexei Kojevnikov, November 23, 1999, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics: passage beginning “Now, during that year in Cambridge …”

Franck Daninos’s interview with François Englert : « Le LHC détectera le boson de Higgs … s’il existe » (“The LHC will detect the Higgs boson … if it exists”), La Recherche 419, 58 (May 2008).

F. Englert, “Broken Symmetry and Yang–Mills Theory,” in 50 Years of Yang–Mills Theories, ed. G. ’t Hooft, World Scientific, Singapore, 2005, p. 65.

G. S. Guralnik, “The History of the Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble Development of the Theory of Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking and Gauge Particles,” Int. J. Mod. Phys. 24, 2601 (2009); “Gauge Invariance and the Goldstone Theorem,” Mod. Phys. Lett. A 26, 1381 (2011); “Heretical Ideas that Provided the Cornerstone for the Standard Model of Particle Physics,” Swiss Physical Society Milestones in Physics (May 2013).

P. W. Higgs, “SBGT and all that,” in Discovery of Weak Neutral Currents: The Weak Interaction Before and After, ed. A. K. Mann and D. B. Cline, AIP Conf. Proc. 300, 159 (1994); “My Life as a Boson: The Story of ‘The Higgs’,” Int. J. Mod. Phys. A 17S1, 86 (2002).

T. W. B. Kibble, “Englert-Brout-Higgs-Guralnik-Hagen-Kibble Mechanism (History),” Scholarpedia 4(1), 8741 (2009); “It didn’t seem that special at the time,” interview by Alok Jha, The Observer, Saturday 10 August 2013.

2010 J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics videos on YouTube.

The US needs a strong, well-funded domestic program in particle physics, both to complement major international projects and to contribute to them . . .

Read my Point of View in the daily edition of Physics Today, May 31, 2013.