The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013
Britain's Peter Higgs and Francois Englert of Belgium won the Nobel Prize for Physics on Tuesday for predicting the existence of the Higgs boson particle that explains how elementary matter attained the mass to form stars and planets.
Half a century after their original work, the new building block of nature was finally detected in 2012 at the CERN research centre's giant, underground particle-smasher near Geneva. The discovery was hailed as one of the most important in physics.
"I am overwhelmed to receive this award and thank the Royal Swedish Academy," Higgs said in a statement released by the University of Edinburgh. "I hope this recognition of fundamental science will help raise awareness of the value of blue-sky research."
The two scientists had been favourites to share the eight million Swedish kronor ($1.25 million US) prize after their theoretical work was vindicated by the CERN experiments
To find the elusive particle, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) had to pore over data from the wreckage of trillions of sub-atomic proton collisions.
"I'm thrilled that this year's Nobel Prize has gone to particle physics," said CERN director general Rolf Heuer. He said the discovery of the particle at CERN last year "marks the culmination of decades of intellectual effort by many people around the world."
'From flowers and people to stars and planets'
"The awarded theory is a central part of the Standard Model of particle physics that describes how the world is constructed," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement.
"According to the Standard Model, everything, from flowers and people to stars and planets, consists of just a few building blocks: matter particles."
