The Discovery and Characterization of a Higgs Boson

The announcement on July 4th, 2012 of the discovery of a new particle at CERN was the culmination of a decades-long, worldwide effort to construct and operate the LHC accelerator and the ATLAS and CMS experiments that together represent the largest, most complex system ever built for physics research. Since then, substantially more data has been studied to reveal more about the character of this new particle and major initiatives have been launched for new detectors and new machines to further elucidate its detailed properties in order to obtain clues to some of the biggest open questions in our understanding of the universe.