The Long Reach of Basic Research: The United States Air Force and the 2013 Nobel Physics Laureates Published Oct. 18, 2013 By Robert P. White, Ph.D. Air Force Office of Scientific Research ARLINGTON, Va. -- On 8 October it was announced that Francois Englert of Belgium and Peter Higgs of Great Britain won the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics for their theoretical discoveries on how subatomic particles acquire mass--and it was fifty years ago that the United States Air Force funded both of these eminent physicists in their search for what ultimately came to be called the Higgs Boson. On 4 July 2012, scientists at Geneva-based CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced they had found the Higgs boson, which takes its name from British physicist Peter Higgs and is a key to the Standard Model, which, in physics, accounts for all the particles that make up nature. In the case of the Higgs boson, it is thought to be critical to the existence of the universe itself because this particle is thought to provide the property of mass. As part of the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), which manages the basic research effort for the Air Force, funded Dr. Higgs in this endeavor in 1964-65 when he was at the Department of Physics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, while on leave from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. But the theoretical effort was not Higgs' alone. This key to the Standard Model was proposed by several physicists besides Higgs at about the same time. There were five additional figures who contributed significantly to the Higgs theory in 1964, and those five--Drs. Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen and Tom Kibble, at Imperial College in London, and Drs. François Englert and Robert Brout at the University of Brussels, were funded in two grants through the European Office of Aerospace Research and Development (EOARD), the overseas office of AFOSR. Physical Review Letters (PRL) selected all three groups' 1964 "symmetry breaking" papers for their Milestone Papers honor. While taking similar approaches to the boson issue, all three independently came to essentially the same conclusion. What is noteworthy with regard to the PRL milestone papers are the critical contributions of each supporting the point that the particles that carry the weak force acquire their mass through interactions with what we now term the Higgs field, an all-pervasive force that provides the environment in which interactions occur via particles now known as Higgs bosons. The Higgs boson and the Higgs field provide the basis for why elementary particles have mass. Without the verification of the Higgs boson, the Standard Model was incomplete in its arrangement of the myriad of particles and forces of nature. As a precursor to this year's Nobel physics award regarding the significance of these findings, all six of these scientists shared the 2010 Sakurai Prize, "...for elucidation of the properties of spontaneous symmetry breaking in four-dimensional relativistic gauge theory and of the mechanism for the consistent generation of vector boson masses". The beauty of theoretical physics is the ability to postulate the existence of nature's building blocks, many of which were predicted decades before their existence was proven in the laboratory--or in the 17 mile long tunnel of CERN's Large Hadron Collider. The beauty of basic research, and the Air Force commitment to such research, is the revolutionary long term benefit--in this case, on an international scale. ________________ ABOUT AFOSR: The Air Force Office of Scientific Research, located in Arlington, Virginia, continues to expand the horizon of scientific knowledge through its leadership and management of the Air Force's basic research program. As a vital component of the Air Force Research Laboratory, AFOSR's mission is to discover, shape and champion basic science that profoundly impacts the future Air Force. The AFOSR European Office of Aerospace Research and Development supports the Air Force science and technology community by identifying foreign technological capabilities and accomplishments that can be applied to Air Force needs.