STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Oct. 8 (UPI) -- Physicists from Britain and Belgium won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work how particles acquire mass, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
Francois Englert and Peter Higgs separately proposed in 1964 the theory independently and in 2012, their ideas were confirmed by the discovery of a so-called Higgs boson particle -- sometimes called the "God particle" because of its fundamental place at the center of physics theory -- at the CERN laboratory outside Geneva, Switzerland, the academy said in a release Tuesday.
The theory is a central part of the Standard Model of particle physics that describes how the world is constructed from just a few building blocks: matter particles.
The CERN laboratory for particle physics confirmed the theory in July 2012 by discovery of a Higgs particle. Two research groups extracted the Higgs particle from billions of particle collisions in CERN's Particle Collider, the Large Hadron Collider.
Englert, earned his doctorate from Universite Libre de Bruxelles, where he is a professor emeritus.
Peter W. Higgs, received his doctorate from King's College, University of London. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Edinburgh.
