UNA PIETRA MILIARE NELLA COMPRENSIONE DEL MICROCOSMO: IL BOSONE DI HIGGS

Abstract

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 has been awarded to P.W. Higgs and F. Englert for the conception of a theoretical framework that contributes to the understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles. The mechanism (known as the Higgs mechanism) has been recently confirmed by the observation of the fundamental particle predicted (the so called Higgs boson) by the ATLAS and CMS experiments of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Geneva. Particle physicists all over the world, both theoreticians and experimentalists, have contributed to the result in the last thirty years, to say the least: in the present paper an account is given of this discovery, a milestone in the current understanding of the microcosm.