After finishing his doctorate, Higgs was appointed a Senior
Research Fellow at the
University of Edinburgh (1954–56). He then held various posts at
Imperial College London, and
University College London (where he also became a temporary lecturer in mathematics). He returned to the
University of Edinburgh in 1960 to take up the post of Lecturer at the Tait Institute of Mathematical Physics, allowing him to settle in the city he had enjoyed while
hitchhiking to the Western
Highlands as a student in 1949. He was promoted to
Reader, became a
Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) in 1974 and was promoted to a personal chair of Theoretical Physics in 1980. On his retirement in 1996, he became an
emeritus professor. At Edinburgh, Higgs first became interested in
mass, developing the idea that particles – massless when the universe began – acquired mass a fraction of a second later as a result of interacting with a theoretical field (which became known as the
Higgs field). Higgs postulated that this field permeates space, giving mass to all elementary subatomic particles interacting with it. The
Higgs mechanism postulates the existence of the Higgs field, which confers mass on quarks and leptons; this causes only a tiny portion of the masses of other subatomic particles, such as protons and neutrons. In these, gluons that bind quarks together confer most of the particle mass. The original basis of Higgs's work came from the Japanese-born theorist and Nobel Prize laureate
Yoichiro Nambu from the
University of Chicago. Nambu had proposed a theory known as
spontaneous symmetry breaking based on what was known to happen in
superconductivity in condensed matter, which incorrectly predicted massless particles (the
Goldstone's theorem). He stated that there was no "eureka moment" in the development of the theory. He wrote a short paper exploiting a loophole in Goldstone's theorem (massless Goldstone particles need not occur when local symmetry is spontaneously broken in a relativistic theory Higgs wrote a second paper describing a theoretical model (the
Higgs mechanism), but the paper was rejected (the editors of
Physics Letters judged it "of no obvious relevance to physics"). Other physicists,
Robert Brout and
François Englert and
Gerald Guralnik,
C. R. Hagen and
Tom Kibble had reached similar conclusions at about the same time. In the published version, Higgs quotes Brout and Englert, and the third paper quotes the previous ones. The three papers written on this boson discovery by Higgs, Guralnik, Hagen, Kibble, Brout, and Englert were each recognised as milestone papers by
Physical Review Letters 50th-anniversary celebration. While each of these famous papers took similar approaches, the contributions and differences between the
1964 PRL symmetry breaking papers are noteworthy. The mechanism had been proposed in 1962 by
Philip Anderson although he did not include a crucial relativistic model. On 4 July 2012, CERN announced the
ATLAS and
Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiments had seen strong indications for the presence of a new particle, which could be the Higgs boson, in the mass region around 126 gigaelectronvolts (
GeV). Speaking at the seminar in
Geneva, Higgs commented "It's really an incredible thing that it's happened in my lifetime." Ironically, this probable confirmation of the Higgs boson was made at the same place where the editor of
Physics Letters rejected Higgs's paper. ==Awards and honours==