The Asturias Foundation announced on 29 May 2013 that Physicist Peter Higgs and Francois Englert and the European organization for Nuclear Research won the 2013 Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research in recognition of their work establishing the existence of the so-called God particle.
Higgs and Englert - along with the late Robert Brout - formulated in 1964 the existence of a subatomic particle that came to be known as the Higgs boson. But it was only in 2012 that the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, was able to confirm the existence of this particle through experiments conducted with the Large Hadron Collider.
This finding, which has been called the greatest discovery in the history of the understanding of Nature, enables a glimpse at what happened immediately after the Big Bang.
Higgs is a native of Newcastle, England, who taught for 16 years at the University of Edinburgh. Englert is an 80-year-old Belgian, is affiliated with the Institute for Quantum Studies at Chapman University in California.
Along with a cash prize of 50000 euros (about 64000 US dollars) and a sculpture by Joan Miro, each award recipient gets a diploma and an insignia bearing the Prince of Asturias Foundation's coat of arms.
Spain's Crown Prince Felipe will give the award at a ceremony in the northern city of Oviedo. The prize is regarded as the Ibero-American world's equivalent of the Nobels.
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