The theoretical work of Peter Higgs and Francois Englert, honored today (Oct. 8) by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences with the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics, "is an amazing intellectual achievement," says University of Oregon particle physicist James Brau.

The recipients were recognized for the theory developed in the 1960s of what is known as the Higgs field, which gives elementary particles mass. U.S. scientists, including a team from the UO's Oregon Center for High Energy Physics, led by Brau, played a significant role in the experiments that discovered the particle that proves the existence of the Higgs field, the Higgs boson. Those experiments were performed at the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN laboratory in Europe.

"The development of the Higgs mechanism by this year's Nobel recipients and others who also contributed to the theory was an amazing achievement in understanding the fundamental nature of the origin of mass and the mechanism behind the distinct appearance of the electromagnetic force as well as the weak nuclear force," said Brau, the UO's Knight Professor of Natural Science. "This is an amazing intellectual achievement of the highest scientific significance.”

Congratulate Jim Brau on his contributions toward the discovery of the Higgs boson.

Approximately 2,000 physicists from U.S. institutions — including 89 U.S. universities and seven U.S. Department of Energy laboratories — participate in the ATLAS and CMS experiments, making up about 23 percent of the ATLAS collaboration and 33 percent of CMS at the time of the Higgs discovery.

UO particle physicist David Strom was the trigger coordinator — the person responsible for selection of the data captured and analyzed — at ATLAS during the experiments that appear to have fulfilled the Higgs theory. He recently was chosen by the ATLAS Trigger and Data Acquisition (TDAQ) system's institutional board as TDAQ co-leader as of Aug. 1; In March 2015, he begins a one-year term as overall project leader for the system.

Congratulate David Strom on his work in discovering the Higgs boson.

Strom’s UO colleague, Eric Torrence, was chosen by the ATLAS institutional board, made up of a representative of each participating institution, to serve as data preparation deputy coordinator effective this month; he will serve as coordinator for a year beginning in October 2014.

Another UO particle physicist, Stephanie Majewski, also a member of the ATLAS Collaboration, is working on the upgrade of the ATLAS detector, which will resume running next spring. Majewski, who previously worked at CERN as a member of Brookhaven National Laboratory's ATLAS team before joining the UO last year, is installing demonstration hardware into the detector for the next phase of experiments. When new experiments resume, Strom said, they will be performed at higher energy and "open the door for discoveries that we hope will be even more dramatic."

- from “Oregon's Brau says Nobel Prize for Higgs boson is right call,” by Jim Barlow, UO Office of Strategic Communications