Peter Higgs, Nobel Prize winner, dies at age 94 – 04/09/2024 – Science

British physicist Peter Higgs, one of those responsible for one of the most spectacular theoretical predictions ever confirmed in the history of physics, died this Monday (8), at the age of 94: the existence of a particle that would complete the sticker album of these subatomic entities. and would explain how all particles acquire their mass.

The information was announced by the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, where he was an emeritus professor. “He passed away peacefully at his home on Monday, April 8, after a short illness,” the charity said in a statement.

The scientist will be remembered mainly because of the particle that bears his name – the Higgs boson, whose discovery was announced with great fanfare by Cern (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in 2012, making the researcher famous throughout the world and validating the effort to build the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), the largest particle accelerator in the world, at a cost of 10 billion euros.

The following year, Higgs and François Englert would together win the Nobel Prize in Physics, “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our contribution to the origin of the mass of subatomic particles.”

With a doctorate in physics from King’s College London in 1954, the scientist would make his greatest contribution to science in 1964. As a researcher at the University of Edinburgh, he would write an article published in a Cern journal, Physics Letters, outlining his theory to explain the particle masses. A second article, submitted in the same year to the journal Physical Review Letters, would describe what is now called the “Higgs mechanism”, the way in which particles acquire their masses.

A simple way to explain the idea is to think that space is taken over by a field that acts as a kind of drag for the movement of particles, which then manifest their masses according to the intensity of this interaction. Think of marbles of different sizes in the middle of a swimming pool, each of which feels the resistance of the water to its movement in a different way.

However, this Higgs field, to which a specific particle corresponds, unlike a swimming pool, with its limits and borders, would be in every corner of the Universe. It would be omnipresent. Because of this, the American physicist Leon Lederman would call the Higgs boson the “God particle” – which would give another level of notoriety to Higgs’ work (who was never religious, by the way).

Two other groups of scientists (the duo Robert Brout and François Englert and the trio Gerald Guralnik, CR Hagen and Tom Kibble) reached the same conclusions independently that same year. The three articles, by the way, were celebrated as major milestones by Physical Review Letters on its 50th anniversary.

“There are moments in science when a certain idea seems to hover in the air and ends up being picked up by several people”, says Sérgio Novaes, a physicist at Unesp (Universidade Estadual Paulista) associated with Cern and one of the participants in the discovery of the Higgs boson, in 2012. “This is what happened with the concept of the Higgs mechanism. The proposal solved an important problem involving the mass of certain particles. Although he was not the only one to conceive this mechanism, Peter Higgs was the first to identify a remaining particle in the model: the Higgs boson.”

Novaes remembers that the idea was not immediately embraced by scientists. “Despite being quite interesting, the model suffered great resistance from the scientific community due to the artificiality of the proposal.”

It also didn’t help that it wasn’t so easily verifiable, considering the uncertainties involved in the amount of energy required from a particle accelerator to, through collisions, conjure for a fraction of a second the elusive existence of the Higgs boson before it could decay. and convert into other lighter particles. However, a lack of satisfactory alternative models capable of explaining the origin of particle masses for almost 50 years ended up making the idea be seen in a better light. “So much so that the largest scientific instrument ever made, the LHC, was built for the purpose of investigating the Higgs.”

In 2012, the ideas of Peter Higgs, François Englert and their colleagues would be vindicated by the discovery made by the Atlas and CMS experiments at the LHC, thus completing the so-called Standard Model of Particle Physics — the theoretical framework that brings together all the subatomic entities that generate matter and particles carrying three of the four known forces of nature: the strong nuclear force, which holds atomic nuclei together; the weak, which produces certain radioactive decays; and electromagnetics—nothing less than light, responsible for electrical and magnetic phenomena. It is the most tested theory in the history of science.

“The Higgs boson had all the properties predicted by the model, such as spin, decay modes, coupling to other particles, etc.”, says Novaes. “It was a fantastic success that crowned human ingenuity and its ability to unravel the workings of nature.”

For Peter Higgs, however, the result was bittersweet. Although thrilled and happy to see his theoretical work finally crowned by the relentless scrutiny of physical reality, the modest and reclusive scientist was uncomfortable with the spotlight that was shone on him. In an interview with Scientific American magazine, the researcher even said that the discovery of the boson “ruined [sua] life.” “My relatively peaceful existence was ending. My style is to work in isolation and occasionally come up with a brilliant idea.”

Winning the Nobel Prize made the scientist leave his home in the urban area of ​​Edinburgh to go live in the countryside, where he left us peacefully this Monday.