evidence: In just ten years physicists have made tremendous steps forward in our understanding of the universe, not only confirming early on that the particle discovered in 2012 is indeed the Higgs boson but also allowing researchers to start building a picture of how the pervasive presence of a Higgs field throughout the universe was established a tenth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. [...] The new particle discovered by the international ATLAS and CMS collaborations in 2012 appeared very much like the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model. But was it actually that long-sought-after particle? As soon as the discovery had been made, ATLAS and CMS set out to investigate in detail whether the properties of the particle they had discovered truly matched those predicted by the Standard Model. By using data from the disintegration, or ‘decay’, of the new particle into two photons, the carriers of the electromagnetic force, the experiments have demonstrated that the new particle has no intrinsic angular momentum, or quantum spin – exactly like the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model. By contrast, all other known elementary particles have spin: the matter particles, such as the ‘up’ and ‘down’ quarks that form protons and neutrons, and the force-carrying particles, such as the W and Z bosons.