On 8 October 2013 in Stockholm, after long consideration and debate, the most prestigious international prize was awarded to François Englert, a Belgian theoretical physicist, and to his British colleague Peter Higgs.
The prize was awarded for “the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to the understanding of the nature of the mass of subatomic particles”. The award was given not for the discovery and prediction of the boson but for the explanation of the mechanism by which the other particles acquire mass.
It should be recalled that the discovery of the fundamental particle in the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN took place on 4 July 2012. The neutral particle was named the Higgs boson. It is one of the heaviest fundamental particles (126 GeV), apart from the top quark (with a mass of 173 GeV).
The principle by which the mass of the fundamental particles, the quarks and the leptons, is organised (known as the Higgs mechanism) was put forward as early as the 1960s by François Englert, Peter Higgs and Robert Brout. The key concept of the Higgs mechanism is that particles passing through space filled with a particular scalar field interact with it and acquire mass. In other words, inertness is formed as a particle passes through some medium.
The simplest analogy for the Higgs mechanism is with people at a party. A popular person appears at the party and forms a crowd of people around himself, like the mass that a particle moving through the Higgs field acquires.