Physicists spent 48 years hunting a particle before finally catching it

In 1964, Peter Higgs and colleagues proposed a field that gives other particles mass, implying a new particle should exist. It took the Large Hadron Collider — a 27-kilometre ring smashing protons near light speed — until 2012 to finally detect the Higgs boson, confirming the last missing piece of the Standard Model. Higgs and François Englert shared the following year's Nobel Prize.

— ATLAS and CMS Collaborations, CERN, Observation of a New Particle in the Search for the Standard Model Higgs Boson — Physics Letters B, 2012