Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 to Englert and Higgs

Great news, arriving at the eve of the workshop of this website: the Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs

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

Interestingly, the noncommutative Standard Model discussed here naturally reproduces the ingeneous, spontaneous symmetry breaking mechanism that is found at the basis of the above Nobel-Prize-winning work. In fact, it seems hard to avoid this kind of symmetry breaking mechanism in all such noncommutative models, as will also be discussed next week in Leiden.

Englert’s relevant contribution was written jointly with Robert Brout, who passed away in 2011:

Phys. Rev. Lett. 13, 321–323 (1964)

and Higgs’s work starts with

Phys. Rev. Lett. 13, 508–509 (1964)

The relevant papers from the ATLAS and CMS experiments can be found on the arXiv:

ATLASObservation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC 

CMSObservation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC

 

One thought on “Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 to Englert and Higgs

  1. laboussoleestmonpays

    I don’t know if it is the most appropriate way to pay tribute to Robert Brout but it is probably the best place and time to propose here and now a relevant contribution by him to promote non commutative geometric tools to physicists ” Notes on Connes’ Construction of the Standard Model” http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9706200 (Nucl.Phys.Proc.Suppl. 65 (1998) 3-15).

    I would also be particularly interested to have some comment by Dr. W.D. van Suijlekom about the last footnote (page 8) in the text written by Brout and Englert for their talk presented at the award ceremony of the 1997 High Energy and Particle Physics Prize of the European Physical Society (http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9802142) :
    Within the past few years, an interesting development has occurred principally due to the mathematician A. Connes who has applied techniques of non commutative geometry to construct the standard model. In this, the key point is that the scalar field plays the role of a gauge connection in the “motion” of a fermion (whose mass is generated by spontaneously broken chiral symmetry) during its zitterbewegung.

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