Higgs boson 'discovery' marks hugely important day for British physics Professor John Womersley The LHC, and the Tevatron in the United States before it, have been searching for evidence of a particle that acts the way we expect the Higgs to. And we have found one. From the way the particle interacts, we know that it is of the type we call "bosons" and from the energy where it exists, it looks like a Higgs. It could still behave differently in detail to the way our theories predict, so this discovery is really just the beginning of the serious research in to the Higgs mechanism - does it work as we expect? How does it interact with different types of particles? What can it tell us about other unsolved problems in our understanding of the universe? The Higgs Boson is named after Newcastle born Professor Peter Higgs, one of a number of theorists who developed this explanation for mass. This discovery adds to the list of fundamental particles known to physics, most of which started off as abstract studies to understand the Universe, such as JJ Thompson's electron (the basis of electric current) or its anti-matter equivalent, Paul Dirac's positron (today the basis of PET scanning medical technology). We have no idea yet whether this new particle with have any practical applications, but it will greatly enhance our understanding of the most fundamental mechanisms at work in the world around us. The technologies developed at CERN to help search for this understanding, most famously the world wide web, have already had a huge impact on our daily lives.