The Higgs boson
A particle predicted in 1964 is found in 2012, completing the Standard Model.
- When
- Era
- Contemporary, Holocene
The Large Hadron Collider — a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets, the largest machine ever built — confirms the Higgs boson in July 2012, nearly fifty years after the mechanism was proposed to explain how particles acquire mass. Higgs and Englert receive the Nobel the following year. It completes the Standard Model, which is now confirmed to remarkable precision and is known to be incomplete.