Peter Higgs, physicist who proposed Higgs boson, dies aged 94

Peter Higgs, the Nobel prize-winning physicist who proposed a new particle known as the Higgs boson, has died, The Guardian reports.

Higgs, 94, who was awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 2013 for his work in 1964 showing how the boson helped bind the universe together by giving particles their mass, died at home in Edinburgh on April 8.

According to the report, after a series of experiments, which began in earnest in 2008, his theory was proven by physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Switzerland in 2012; the Nobel prize was shared with François Englert, a Belgian theoretical physicist whose work in 1964 also contributed directly to the discovery.

A member of the Royal Society and a Companion of Honour, Higgs spent most of his professional life at Edinburgh University, which set up the Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics in his honour in 2012.