Two scientists have won the Nobel prize in physics for their work on the theory of the Higgs boson.

The Nobel committee decided Englert and Higgs should jointly take the accolade for the boson, discovered at Cern in 2012

Peter Higgs, from the UK, and Francois Englert from Belgium, share the prize.

In the 1960s, they were among several physicists who proposed a mechanism to explain why the most basic building blocks of the Universe have mass.

The mechanism predicts a particle - the Higgs boson - which was finally discovered in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, in Switzerland.

"This year's prize is about something small that makes all the difference," said Staffan Normark, permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

(Source: BBC)