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Higgs boson
The Higgs boson is a massive spin-0 elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics that plays a key role in explaining the mass of other elementary particles. Its experimental discovery was announced in a seminar July 4, 2012. This particle was first proposed by Professor Peter Higgs of Edinburgh University in 1964 as a means to explain the origin of the masses of the elementary particles by the introduction of an fundamental scalar field. This gives all the fundamental particles mass via a process of spontaneous symmetry breaking called the Higgs Mechanism. The Higgs boson was popularised as the "God particle" by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon M. Lederman in his 1993 popular science book The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What is the Question? co-written with science writer Dick Teresi.

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