Tom Kibble, a leading British physicist whose work helped lead to the discovery of the Higgs boson, died on Thursday aged 83, his university in London said.

In 1964, Kibble worked on one of the three earliest research papers theorising the existence of the Higgs Boson, a sub-atomic particle believed to explain how matter acquires mass.

In 2012, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced it had discovered a particle commensurate with the boson.