A GIANT MYSTERY, SOLVED BY PHYSICS

In July 2012, researchers announced that they had observed the elusive Higgs boson at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Scientists working independently on the ATLAS and CMS particle detectors both measured a new subatomic particle that was similar in makeup to the theorised Higgs boson particle.

After nearly a year of further analysis, scientists confirmed the ‘measured interactions of the new particle with other particles’ strongly indicated it was indeed a Higgs boson particle. The discovery validated decades of work and furthered our understanding of the Standard Model, a group of theories explaining how the building-block particles for everything in the universe interact with each other.