Higgs Boson Discovery: How Scientists Confirmed Its Existence

The Higgs boson was the last missing piece of the Standard Model.
It was finally discovered in 2012 at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Scientists smashed protons together at near light speed to create Higgs bosons.
The Higgs boson decays instantly, so detectors look for its decay products.
Two giant experiments, ATLAS and CMS, worked independently to verify results.
The discovery confirmed the existence of the Higgs field, which gives particles mass.
It required analyzing petabytes of collision data to spot the rare Higgs events.
The Higgs boson was detected at an energy of about 125 giga-electron volts (GeV).
Its discovery earned the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for Peter Higgs and François Englert.
The Higgs discovery was a historic triumph, proving a 50-year-old prediction true.