 All accelerator complex at CERN looks like this. There is a lot going on in this picture, but we'll focus only on the bit that's relevant for the Higgs search. We begin with protons, which are injected into LINAC2, which I have underlined here. The protons get accelerated to 50 MEV, and these are then injected into the booster, where they get accelerated to 1.4 GeV. After this, the protons get sent to the proton synchrotron, which accelerates the protons even more, to 25 GeV. Next, the super proton synchrotron, or SPS, is used to get the protons to 450 GeV. Finally, they get injected into the LHC, where they travel in two different accelerator tubes and directions. At this final step, they get accelerated to up to 70 EV. In this diagram, ALICE, CMS, LHCV, and ATLAS are all detector stations. These are the regions where collision between the two proton beams can happen. It's in these detector stations where discoveries are made. There are typically a bunch of different layers to each of these detector stations, each of which aims to measure the properties of all the particles produced in a given reaction. They are huge facilities, involving collaborations between lots of different people from all over the world. To give you an idea of how big these detectors are, here's CMS, one of the detector stations involved in the Higgs search. Note the worker in the middle. He gives you some idea of the kind of scale for the whole enterprise. Now that you have an idea of the tools used in the Higgs search, we should finish our original story. The LHCs first started running experiments in September 2008. Two of the detector stations on the LHC, ATLAS, and CMS, were focused on the search for the Higgs boson. On July 4, 2012, both collaborations announced that they had strong evidence of a particle that looked like the Higgs boson in the energy region between 125 and 126 GV. In August, they made the announcement official by publishing two papers. These papers, the cumulative work of thousands of people in many nations, provided experimental evidence of the discovery of the Higgs boson and made it possible for Higgs and Engelbert to receive the Nobel Prize in physics in 2013.