Fresh from being granted the Freedom of the City of Bristol earlier this year, former Cotham School pupil Peter Higgs has won the Nobel prize in physics for his work on the theory of the Higgs boson.

Higgs, who studied at Cotham between 1941 and 1946, shares the prize with Francois Englert from Belgium, shared the prize.

In the 1960s, the pair 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 at Cern in Switzerland.

The official citation read: “For the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the Atlas and CMS experiments at Cern’s Large Hadron Collider.”

In a prepared statement, the 84-year-old Edinburgh University emeritus professor of theoretical physics said: “I am overwhelmed to receive this award and thank the Royal Swedish Academy.

“I would also like to congratulate all those who have contributed to the discovery of this new particle and to thank my family, friends and colleagues for their support.

“I hope this recognition of fundamental science will help raise awareness of the value of blue-sky research.”