Image caption "Fathers" of the Higgs, L-R: Francois Englert, Peter Higgs, Carl Hagen and Gerald Guralnik 
 
 One of the scientists who helped develop the theory of the Higgs boson says the particle should be renamed. 
 
 Carl Hagen believes the name should acknowledge the work of others - not just UK physicist Peter Higgs. 
 
 The long-running debate has been rekindled following speculation that this year's Nobel Prize for Physics will be awarded for the Higgs theory. 
 
 The detection of a particle thought to be the Higgs was announced at the Large Hadron Collider in July last year. 
 
 American Prof Hagen told BBC News: "I have always thought that the name was not a proper one. 
 
 Peter Higgs was treated as something of a rock star and the rest of us were barely recognised. It was clear that Higgs was the dominant name because his name has become associated with the boson Prof Carl Hagen, Rochester University, New York 
 
 "To single out one individual marginalises the contribution of others involved in the work. Although I did not start this campaign to change the name, I welcome it." 
 
 Prof Peter Higgs developed a theory of how other sub-atomic particles came to have substance, or mass, and published his work in 1964. 
 
 However, other researchers independently came up with similar ideas and they, along with Prof Higgs, have long argued for the name of the particle to be changed. 
 
 People have spoken of key contributions being made by Francois Englert, Peter Higgs, Gerald Guralnik, Tom Kibble, Robert Brout and Carl Hagen. Five spoke at a press conference last year to announce the discovery of a particle thought to be the Higgs, but it was only Prof Higgs who received a huge round of applause from the researchers present. 
 
 "Peter Higgs was treated as something of a rock star and the rest of us were barely recognised by most of the audience. It was clear that Higgs was the dominant name because of the fact his name has become associated with the boson," Prof Hagen told BBC World News. 
 
 A spokeswoman from Cern - which operates the Large Hadron Collider - told BBC News that it was not up to the laboratory to determine the name of newly discovered particles. 
 
 "Particles have generally been named by theorists who predict them, an example being the 'quark'; or by experimentalists who discover unpredicted particles such as the neutron," she said. 
 
 "In all cases, the name eventually takes on common usage and is accepted by the particle physics community, and nowadays by the Particle Data Group who refer to Higgs bosons." 
 
 At a physics conference in March to discuss the discovery of the Higgs, researchers were encouraged to refer to the particle as the "SM Scalar Boson". 
 
 Image caption Peter Higgs is open to a name change to "H Boson" 
 
 At the time, it was thought that this was because physicists wanted to be absolutely sure that the claimed particle really was the Higgs before naming it as such. 
 
 Although six theorists are connected with developing the theory of the Higgs, many scientists believe that naming the particle after all of these individuals would be too much of a mouthful. Even acronyms created from the names of all six are inelegant. An example would be "BEHGHK", which would be pronounced "berk". 
 
 Prof Hagen, who is affiliated to the University of Rochester, New York, suggests that it be called the Standard Model Scalar Meson, or SM Squared. 
 
 Nobel Prize 
 
 A maximum of just three individuals can be named as winners of a Nobel Prize. 
 
 Those winners also have to be alive, and the five scientists who developed the Higgs theory that are still eligible for the award are in their 70s and 80s. Prof Brout died in 2011. 
 
 There is therefore considerable pressure on the Nobel committee determining the physics prize to award it for the Higgs before potential winners die. 
 
 Names are given to predicted particles, and eventually one name sticks. This shouldn't been seen as a slight on the others who also contributed to developing this theory Prof Jordan Nash, Imperial College London 
 
 But which three? Prof Hagen believes all six credited with the theory should be recognised along with the huge team of scientists and engineers at the LHC. 
 
 "It is unfortunate that the Nobel committee's bylaws prevent this. I hope some way can be found around it. If not then we will have to live with whatever decision is made". 
 
 Prof Jordan Nash, also at Imperial College London and who is among those who helped detect and characterise the particle at the LHC last year, said it might be impractical to change the name at this stage. 
 
 "I think it is healthy that the scientific community is having a careful look at the really groundbreaking work that was done by this group of scientists, especially now that we know their work 50 years ago has led to predicting something we can see experimentally. 
 
 "That said, the name of the 'Higgs particle' has been in common scientific use for decades. 
 
 "Names are given to predicted particles, and eventually one name sticks. This shouldn't been seen as a slight on the others who also contributed to developing this theory." 
 
 Follow Pallab on Twitter: @bbcpallab ||||| STOCKHOLM Britain's Peter Higgs and Francois Englert of Belgium won the Nobel Prize for physics on Tuesday for predicting the existence of the Higgs boson particle that explains how elementary matter attained the mass to form stars and planets. 
 
 The insight has been hailed as one of the most important in the understanding of the cosmos. Without the Higgs mechanism all particles would travel at the speed of light and atoms would not exist. 
 
 Half a century after the scientists' original prediction, the new building block of nature was finally detected in 2012 at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) centre's giant, underground particle-smasher near Geneva. 
 
 "I am overwhelmed to receive this award," said Higgs, who is known to shun the limelight and did not appear in public on Tuesday despite winning the world's top science prize. 
 
 "I hope this recognition of fundamental science will help raise awareness of the value of blue-sky research," he said in a statement via the University of Edinburgh where he works. 
 
 The two scientists had been favorites to share the 8 million Swedish crown ($1.25 million) prize after their theoretical work was vindicated by the CERN experiments. 
 
 To find the elusive particle, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) had to pore over data from the wreckage of trillions of sub-atomic proton collisions. 
 
 The Higgs boson is the last piece of the Standard Model of physics that describes the fundamental make-up of the universe. Some commentators - though not scientists - have called it the "God particle", for its role in turning the Big Bang into an ordered cosmos. 
 
 Higgs' and Englert's work shows how elementary particles inside atoms gain mass by interacting with an invisible field pervading all of space - and the more they interact, the heavier they become. The particle associated with the field is the Higgs boson. 
 
 The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the prize went to Higgs and Englert for work fundamental to describing how the universe is constructed. 
 
 "According to the Standard Model, everything, from flowers and people to stars and planets, consists of just a few building blocks: matter particles." 
 
 REMAINING QUESTIONS 
 
 Although finding the Higgs boson is a remarkable achievement - and one which Higgs once said he never expected to see in his lifetime - it is not the end of the story for physicists trying to understand the structure of the universe. 
 
 Scientists are now grappling with other mysteries such as understanding the nature of dark matter, which accounts for more than a quarter of the universe, and dark energy, which is believed to be the driver of cosmic expansion. 
 
 Asked how it felt to be a Nobel winner, Englert told reporters by phone link to Stockholm: "You may imagine that this is not very unpleasant, of course. I am very, very happy to have the recognition of this extraordinary award." 
 
 CERN Director General Rolf Heuer said he was "thrilled" that the Nobel prize had gone to particle physics. He said the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN last year marked "the culmination of decades of intellectual effort by many people around the world". 
 
 Some physicists were surprised that there was no recognition for the CERN teams that discovered the new particle, since there had been speculation of a prize for CERN as an institution. 
 
 The will of Swedish dynamite millionaire Alfred Nobel limits the award to a maximum of three people - harking back to an earlier era when science was conducted by individuals or very small teams. 
 
 However, thousands worked on detecting the particle at CERN and a total of six scientists published relevant papers in 1964. 
 
 Englert, 80, and his colleague Robert Brout - who died in 2011 - were first to publish; but the now 84-year-old Higgs followed just a couple of weeks later and was the first to explicitly predict the existence of a new particle. 
 
 Similar proposals from American researchers Carl Hagen and Gerald Guralnik and Britain's Tom Kibble appeared shortly afterwards. 
 
 Kibble said it was no surprise that he and his colleagues were not included in the Nobel honor since "our paper was unquestionably the last of the three to be published in Physical Review Letters in 1964 - though we naturally regard our treatment as the most thorough and complete". 
 
 (Additional reporting by Mia Shanley and Niklas Pollard in Stockholm, Ben Hirschler in London and Robert Evans in Geneva; Editing by Alistair Scrutton, Kate Kelland and Ralph Boulton)
– Amid rumors that this year's Nobel Prize for Physics will go to the Higgs boson theory, some scientists say the particle's name should be changed so that all the glory doesn't go to British physicist Peter Higgs. At a press conference last year to announce the particle's discovery, Higgs "was treated as something of a rock star and the rest of us were barely recognized by most of the audience," American scientist Carl Hagen tells the BBC. Hagen is considered to have helped develop the theory, along with Higgs and four others. Most scientists, however, agree that calling it the Englert-Higgs-Guralnik-Kibble-Brout-Hagen particle would be too unwieldy—and the acronyms aren't much better. Hagen favors the name Standard Model Scalar Meson. In a BBC interview last week, Higgs himself argued that it should really be called the Goldstone particle after Cambridge physicist Jeffrey Goldstone. Higgs explained that the "God particle" nickname for the Higgs started out as a joke, after an editor rejected an author's plan "to call it 'that goddamn particle' because it was clear it was going to be a tough job finding it experimentally."