Edinburg (Ireland), April 10 -- Physicist Peter Higgs, who proposed the existence of the Higgs boson particle, which earned him a Nobel Prize, died at the age of 94, said the University of Edinburgh on Tuesday.

University of Edinburgh, where Higgs was an emeritus professor at the university, said he breathed his last on Monday at home following a short illness.

In 1964, Higgs put forward the concept of the Higgs boson, a breakthrough that was only confirmed nearly half a century later when it was detected at the Large Hadron Collider.

His theory pertained to the mechanism by which subatomic particles, the fundamental components of matter, acquire mass.

This theoretical framework constitutes a fundamental aspect of the Standard Model, ...