Peter Higgs, Emeritus Professor at the University of Edinburgh, played a key role in the development of the Standard Model, our current theory of fundamental physics.

The search for the Higgs Boson is the centrepiece of the Large Hadron Collider programme at CERN, and the existence of this famously elusive particle is likely to be confirmed or refuted with data currently being collected using apparatus partly designed at the University of Bristol.

In his talk, Professor Higgs will introduce the ideas of spontaneous symmetry breaking, and discuss how these developed from their application in condensed matter through the earlier work of Yoichiro Nambu and Jeffrey Goldstone, to the work of Robert Brout, Francois Englert and himself in 1964. The subsequent application of these ideas to electroweak theory will be discussed briefly.