2013 Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Peter Higgs and François Englert

ICTP congratulates Peter Higgs and François Englert who have been awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass 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."

Higgs, Professor emeritus at University of Edinburgh, UK, and Englert, Professor Emeritus at Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium, independently proposed a theory on how subatomic particles acquire mass. Their theory, which was proposed in 1964, is cardinal to the Standard Model of Physics.

Englert has visited ICTP for several high energy and cosmology related workshops and conferences organised at ICTP in the 1980's and Higgs visited the Center in 1987 for a workshop on "Search for Scalar Particles".