CMS Higgs Event, 3D Computer Graphic - The discovery of the Higgs particle in 2012 was named breakthrough of the year by Science magazine. The CMS experiment as one of two experiments at the Large Hadron Collider that recorded telltale signs of the production of the Higgs boson in high-energy proton-proton collisions. About 1,000 physicists, engineers and students from 48 U.S. institutions participate in the CMS collaboration. The Higgs boson or Higgs particle is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics. Observations of the particle allows scientists to explore the Higgs field - a fundamental field of crucial importance to particle physics theory, first suspected to exist in the 1960s, that unlike other known fields such as the electromagnetic field, takes a non-zero constant value almost everywhere.