Congratulations are due to Peter Higgs and Francois Englert, winning the Nobel prize this year for their work on the mechanism on spontaneous symmetry breaking. The work was done way back in the '60s, but of course it was essentially confirmed by the discovery at the LHC last year of a new particle with the predicted properties. Like all discoveries, a number of people contributed, but Higgs in particular predicted the existence of a new bosonic particle. Based on the press release, it looks like Robert Brout might also have won had he still been alive.
