What is the Higgs boson?

The Higgs boson is a particle associated with the Higgs field, an invisible energy field thought to fill all of space. As particles move through this field, they interact with it and acquire mass — the more they interact, the heavier they are. The particle was predicted in 1964 by Peter Higgs and others to explain why some particles have mass while others, like photons, do not. It took nearly half a century to confirm: in 2012, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider detected the Higgs boson, and Higgs and François Englert received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics. It is sometimes nicknamed the “God particle.”