Peter Ware Higgs CH FRS FRSE HonFInstP (29 May 1929 – 8 April 2024) was a British theoretical physicist, professor at the University of Edinburgh,[8][9] and Nobel laureate in Physics for his work on the mass of subatomic particles.[10][11]

In the 1960s, Higgs proposed that broken symmetry in electroweak theory could explain the origin of mass of elementary particles in general and of the W and Z bosons in particular. This so-called Higgs mechanism, which was proposed by several physicists besides Higgs at about the same time, predicts the existence of a new particle, the Higgs boson, the detection of which became one of the great goals of physics.[12][13] On 4 July 2012, CERN announced the discovery of the boson at the Large Hadron Collider.[14] The Higgs mechanism is generally accepted as an important ingredient in the Standard Model of particle physics, without which certain particles would have no mass.[15]