Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Your Excellences, Ladies and Gentleman.

It is a great honour for François Englert and me to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics and we wish to express our sincere gratitude to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation.

It is a matter of great regret for both of us that Robert Brout did not live to share the Prize with us. The fact that it has been awarded just to the two of us implicitly recognizes his contribution, as is right. However, it should be remembered that the three of us were not the only theorists who contributed to the elucidation of what is called the BEH mechanism about fifty years ago.

The long time gap between the theoretical work and the award of the Prize is largely a consequence of the difficulty of performing experiments needed to detect the new particle that is an essential feature of our theory. More than thirty years of work on the development of accelerators, detectors and computer programmes have culminated in the claim made by CERN in July 2012. It was a great achievement by all the people involved, and we are grateful to them for enabling us to be here today.