Peter Higgs

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Peter Higgs at the press conference on the occasion of the award of the Nobel Prize, 2013

Peter Ware Higgs , CH , FRS , FRSE , FKC (born May 29, 1929 in Newcastle upon Tyne , England ) is a British theoretical physicist . On October 8, 2013, he and François Englert were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for developing the Higgs mechanism .

Life

Higgs is the son of a BBC sound engineer and attended school in Bristol and London . He received his Bachelor in Physics with Honors (First Class Honors) in 1950 and a Masters degree from King's College London in 1951 . In 1954 , Higgs received his doctorate with the work Some Problems in the Theory of Molecular Vibrations also at King's College London with Christopher Longuet-Higgins . 1954/55 he worked at Edinburgh University, 1956 at University College London and from 1957 at Imperial College London , each with research grants.

Higgs was a brief lecturer in mathematics at Imperial College and returned to Edinburgh in 1960 as a lecturer in mathematical physics . It was there in 1964 that he wrote the work that later made him famous. In 1970 he became a reader (a kind of professor without a chair ) in Edinburgh, from 1980 he was a personal chair (an award for outstanding scientific achievements) professor of theoretical physics in Edinburgh. In 1996 he retired .

Higgs is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1974), the Royal Society (since 1983) and the Institute of Physics (since 1991). In 1981 he received the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society with TWB Kibble , and in 1984 also with Kibble the Rutherford Medal of the Institute of Physics . In 1997 he received the Dirac Medal . In 1997 he received the High Energy and Particle Physics Prize of the European Physical Society with Robert Brout and François Englert and in 2004 all three received the Wolf Prize in Physics. In 2010 Higgs, Robert Brout, François Englert, Gerald Guralnik , Carl R. Hagen and TWB Kibble were honored with the Sakurai Prize . In 2013 he and François Englert received the Prince of Asturias Prize . Higgs holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Bristol (1997), Edinburgh (1998) and Glasgow (2002). In 2012 he was appointed a member of the Order of the Companions of Honor (CH).

In 2013, Higgs received the Nobel Prize in Physics together with François Englert; in the run-up he was traded as a favorite for this one.

In July 2015 he received the Copley Medal from the British Royal Society for his work on the Higgs particle.

Peter Higgs has two sons.

plant

Higgs became known through his work, which led in particular to the Higgs mechanism named after him (published 1964). It is a generalization of the ideas developed by Philip Warren Anderson on solid-state physics , especially superconductivity , to the relativistic quantum field theory . His retrospectively famous work was initially rejected by the European journal Physics Letters (after it had previously published a first paper by Higgs in which he pointed out a gap in the gold stone theorem). He then published it in the US American journal Physical Review Letters , where he first mentioned the Higgs particle , which was later named after him, in an addendum . The work initially met with skepticism, but its importance was recognized by Freeman Dyson , who invited Higgs to give a lecture at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1965 . Independently and at the same time as Higgs, the effect was discovered by François Englert and Robert Brout in Brussels, and Gerald Guralnik , Carl R. Hagen and TWB Kibble at Imperial College in London. When the standard model was developed in the late 1960s, however, Higgs' name for the effect prevailed, which was then very well known. According to Higgs' own statements, however, at that time he could no longer catch up with the stormy development of theoretical elementary particle physics at the beginning of the 1970s.

Almost 50 years after Higgs' publication, scientists from the European nuclear research center CERN declared that they had for the first time succeeded with great probability at the Large Hadron Collider in detecting a boson with a mass of about 125 GeV / c², which is the long-sought Higgs Boson could act. This proof was achieved with two independent detectors, the LHC experiments ATLAS and CMS . Peter Higgs himself was present at the press conference that was held at CERN on July 4, 2012.

literature

  • Peter Higgs: My life as a boson. The story of the Higgs . In: Michael Duff, James Liu (editors): 2001 - A spacetime odyssey . World Scientific, Singapore 2002, pp. 86-89.

Web links

Commons : Peter Higgs  - Collection of Images

Footnotes

  1. ^ The University of Edinburgh: Peter Higgs: Curriculum Vitae , accessed October 8, 2013.
  2. ^ Nobelprize.org: The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 , accessed October 8, 2013.
  3. ^ Telegraph: Prof Peter Higgs profile
  4. ^ The Guardian: The god of small things
  5. ↑ 2013 Predictions. Thomson Reuters (sciencewatch.com), archived from the original on September 27, 2013 ; Retrieved September 25, 2013 .
  6. ↑ Physicist Peter Higgs receives Copley Medal. ORF.at, July 20, 2015, accessed on October 23, 2018 .
  7. ↑ Peter Higgs: Broken symmetries, massless particles and gauge fields. In: Physics Letters. Volume 12, 1964, p. 132. Peter Higgs: Broken symmetries and the masses of gauge bosons. In: Physical Review Letters. Volume 13, 1964, p. 508.
  8. ↑ Higgs explicitly refers to Anderson's work in his work published in the Physical Review Letters .
  9. ↑ At the urging of the referee Yōichirō Nambu , he commented on the previously published work by Englert and Brout.
  10. ↑ Benjamin W. Lee was the first to name the new hypothetical scalar particle at the Rochester Conference in Berkeley in 1966 after Higgs, see the communication ( Memento of February 10, 2012 in the Internet Archive ): Nobelist Steven Weinberg Praises Professor Carl Hagen and Collaborators for Higgs Boson Theory ( laudation on Hagen at the University of Rochester ).
  11. ↑ Ulrich Schnabel: The Higgs Particle. Peter Higgs. In: The time . September 4, 2008
  12. ↑ CERN experiments observe particle consistent with long-sought Higgs boson . Press release from CERN. July 4, 2012. Retrieved July 6, 2012.
personal data
SURNAME Higgs, Peter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Higgs, Peter Ware (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British theoretical physicist
DATE OF BIRTH May 29, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Newcastle upon Tyne , England