Peter Higgs & François Englert win Nobel Prize for Physics

Peter Higgs, the UK-based physicist, has won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics along with Belgian François Englert. Early in his career, Peter Higgs undertook a year-long ICI Research Fellowship at UCL. He later became a temporary lecturer in mathematics at UCL, leaving in 1960 to return to the University of Edinburgh - where he remains to this day, now as Emeritus Professor of particle physics. UCL also awarded Peter Higgs an honorary doctorate of science in 2010. The Royal Swedish Academy awarded the prize for "the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the Atlas and CMS experiments at Cern's Large Hadron Collider." UCL High Energy Physics is heavily involved in the Atlas experiment. UCL staff and PhD students are members of the collaboration, and data from the experiment has even been used in undergraduate projects. Professor Jon Butterworth, Head of UCL Physics & Astronomy and member of the Atlas experiment said: "François Englert and Peter Higgs certainly deserve this.