Nobel Prize in Physics for Higgs and Englert: Imperial physicists react

The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded today, we asked scientists at Imperial College London for their reactions. The prize has been awarded to Peter Higgs and Francois Englert for work in the 1960's that led to the concept of a mass-giving particle now known as the Higgs boson , and proved a key feature of the standard model of particle physics. Their research, along with that of Imperial's Emeritus Professor Tom Kibble and others, has been tipped to scoop the prize since results from CERN in July 2012 looked likely to verify the existence of a new particle that they believed to be the Higgs boson. In 1964 Professor Kibble wrote a research paper in collaboration with two American scientists - National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow Gerald Guralnik, and Richard Hagen from the University of Rochester, New York - that was one of three describing a new theory of how certain particles can acquire mass, which has come to be known as the 'Higgs mechanism'. On hearing about the award, Professor Kibble said: "I am glad to see that the Swedish Academy has recognized the importance of the mass-generating mechanism for gauge theories and the prediction of the Higgs boson, recently verified at CERN. "My two collaborators, Gerald Guralnik and Carl Richard Hagen, and I contributed to that discovery, but our paper was unquestionably the last of the three to be published in Physical Review Letters in 1964 - though we naturally regard our treatment as the most thorough and complete - and it is therefore no surprise that the Swedish Academy felt unable to include us, constrained as they are by a self-imposed rule that the Prize cannot be shared by more than three people.