The Higgs boson is the fundamental force-carrying particle of the Higgs field, which is responsible for granting other particles their mass. This field was first proposed in the mid-sixties by Peter Higgs — for whom the particle is named and his colleagues.
The particle was finally discovered on July 4, 2012, by researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — the most powerful particle accelerator in the world — located at the European particle physics laboratory CERN, Switzerland.
The LHC confirmed the existence of the Higgs field and the mechanism that gives rise to mass and thus completed the standard model of particle physics — the best description we have of the subatomic world.
