François Englert and Peter Higgs share Physics Nobel

BBC : The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced today that the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics would be awarded to François Englert and Peter Higgs for—to quote the official prize citation—"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.” In 1964 Peter Higgs and, independently, Englert and his now-deceased colleague, Robert Brout, devised a theoretical mechanism that solved an open question within what would later become the standard model of particle physics: What endows particles with mass? Brout, Englert, and Higgs realized that the missing ingredient was a symmetry-breaking mechanism, which also predicted the existence of a new particle, the Higgs boson. That the Higgs mechanism would be honored had been widely anticipated. What came as a surprise was the omission of representatives from the experimental teams or from a third group of theorists who had independently predicted the same mechanism but had submitted it for publication a few months after the papers by Higgs and by Brout and Englert.