God particle pioneers win Spanish award

Madrid, May 29 (IANS) British physicist Peter Higgs, Belgian Francois Englert and CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, have won Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award for Scientific and Technical Research.

Higgs and Englert, who worked alongside the late Robert Brout, in 1964 first developed the theory on the subatomic particle, known as the “God Particle”, Xinhua reported.

The existence of this “God Particle”, was confirmed by the CERN last year with experiments in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Higgs, born in 1929, has a long and distinguished career as a physicist behind him and has won many awards, including the High Energy and Particle Physics Prizein 1997, the Wolf Prize in Physics in 2004 and the Nonino Prize in 2013.

Englert, who is three years younger than Higgs, is currently affiliated with the Institute for Quantum Studies at Chapman University in California.

CERN is an international and inter-governmental organisation based in Geneva, and made up of 20 member states. It opened in 1954 and employs around 2,500 people directly, while a further 8,000 scientists of 85 nationalities from 580 universities help with its projects.

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