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I knew we had it

Nature Physics volume 18, pages 722–724 (2022)Cite this article

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As we celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson, CERN’s Director-General at that time reminisces about the years leading up to this milestone.

The discovery of the Higgs boson was undoubtedly one of the greatest highlights of my career. The Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism4,5,6 and its associated scalar boson had been a constant presence in my professional life for as long as I can remember. When Robert Brout together with François Englert, and, independently, Peter Higgs published their papers4,5, which were soon to be followed by that of Gerry Guralnik, Carl Hagen and Tom Kibble6, I was just a teenager.

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Fig. 1: Higgs decay into two photons.

reproduced from ref. 3 under a Creative Commons licence CC BY 4.0

Fig. 2: Exclusion limit on Higgs mass from LEP.

reproduced with permission from ref. 7, Elsevier

Fig. 3: Constraints on Higgs mass as of March 2011.

Fermilab

Fig. 4: Higgs couplings.

reproduced from ref. 12 under a Creative Commons licence CC BY 4.0

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks go to J. Gillies for his help in preparing this Comment.

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  1. CERN https://home.cern

    Rolf-Dieter Heuer

  2. University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Rolf-Dieter Heuer

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Correspondence to Rolf-Dieter Heuer.

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Heuer, RD. I knew we had it. Nat. Phys. 18, 722–724 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-022-01673-1

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