The Higgs Boson and the Origin of Mass

In 2012, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider announced the observation of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson. This particle is an excitation of the Higgs field; interaction with that field gives mass to elementary particles, including W and Z bosons and fermions. However, not all ordinary matter's mass “comes from the Higgs boson”: most of the mass of protons and neutrons arises from the energy of the strong interaction among quarks and gluons.