YITP and Department Professor Emeritus John (Jack) Smith travelled to the 2013 Nobel Prize Award Ceremony as the guest of Peter Higgs, who shared the Physics Prize with Francois Englert for proposing what is known colloquially as the "Higgs boson",  discovered at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

Jack was Peter's first research student, writing a Master's thesis "Gauge Invariance in Quantum  Electrodynamics" at Edinburgh University.     Jack went on to a distinguished career in particle theory, related to colliders like the one at CERN.   His contributions were an important part of the groundwork for this discovery, including his 2003 paper with V. Ravidran and W. van Neerven on the calculation of the "Higgs production" cross section, a publication with over 500 citations (and growing).

The picture show Jack and wife Elsebeth with Peter Higgs.    Jack describes a whirlwind of lectures, formal ceremony and celebration dinners, finishing with a luncheon at the Embassy of the United Kingdom.