THE SEARCH FOR, AND DISCOVERY OF, THE HIGGS BOSON AT CMS

The Higgs field was first proposed almost 50 years ago. Twenty years ago the tools needed to discover the Higgs boson, the large hadron collider and the CMS and ATLAS experiments, were initiated. Data taking was begun in 2010 and culminated in the announcement of the discovery of a "Higgs-like" boson on 4 July 2012. This discovery completes the Standard Model (SM) of high energy physics, if it is indeed the hypothesized SM Higgs particle. Future data taking will explore the properties of the new 125 GeV particle to see if it has all the attributes of an SM Higgs and to explore the mechanism that maintains its "low" mass.