Nandini Trivedi and her theory-experiment collaboration have observed the Higgs boson in a superconductor.  These discoveries were recently published in Nature Physics and commented on by Nobel Laureate P.W. Anderson in News and Views in Nature Physics as well.

Dr Trivedi explains the discovery below. 

The Higgs boson with a mass of 127 GeV was discovered at the proton-proton large hadron collider last year and made big waves in the media. The Higgs boson is also expected in a superconducting material emphasizing the universality of phenomena across different disciplines. A superconductor is an amazing state of matter in which current flows with zero resistance below a certain transition temperature. Microscopically this happens because individual electrons pair up and condense into a single coherent state, similar to a coherent state of photons in a laser. This state is described by a single complex wave function of the condensate with an amplitude and phase. However, unlike the Higgs boson in particle physics that is an elementary particle, the Higgs boson in a superconductor is a composite of two electrons. One of the biggest challenges in observing this super-conducting Higgs boson has been to separate the oscillations of the amplitude mode from the pair breaking scale. From our recent theoretical studies we predict [1] that by increasing disorder in a superconductor, it would undergo a quantum phase transition to an insulator at a critical disorder strength. And remarkably, at this transition, the pair breaking scale would remain finite while the mass of the Higgs boson would vanish, thereby separating these two scales. Our predictions were experimentally verified recently [2] in various thin films of superconducting NbN and InO by measuring near the quantum critical point (a) the dynamical conductivity in the tera-hertz regime that is sensitive to the Higgs mass, and (b) the tunneling density of states that is sensitive to the pair breaking scale. The excess absorption below the pair breaking scale gives strong evidence of the Higgs mode in two-dimensional quantum critical superconductors. The News and Views by the Nobel Laureate P.W. Anderson[3] highlights our achievements and put it in a historical context.

[1] M. Swanson, Y-L Loh, M. Randeria, and N. Trivedi, “Dynamical Conductivity across the Disorder-Tuned Superconductor-Insulator Transition”, Phys. Rev. X 4, 021007 (2014)

[2] D. Sherman, U. S. Pracht, B. Gorshunov, S. Poran, J. Jesudasan, M. Chand, P.Raychaudhuri, M. Swanson, N. Trivedi, A. Auerbach, M. Scheffler, A. Frydman, and M. Dressel, “Observation of the Higgs mode in disordered superconductors close to a quantum phase transition”, doi: 10.1038/NPHYS3227

[3] P.W. Anderson, News and Views, www.nature.com/naturephysics January 26, 2015