Nobel prize winner Peter Higgs has joined the ranks of Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein by winning the world's oldest scientific prize, the Royal Society's Copley Medal, for his pioneering work on the theory of the Higgs boson, which was discovered in 2012.



86-year-old Higgs received the Copley Medal for his fundamental contribution to particle physics with his theory explaining the origin of mass in elementary particles, confirmed by the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider.



The Copley medal was first awarded by the Royal Society in 1731, 170 years before the first Nobel Prize.



It is awarded for outstanding achievements in scientific research and has most recently been awarded to eminent scientists such as theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, DNA fingerprinting pioneer Alec Jeffreys and Andre Geim, for his discovery of graphene.



Modern physics suggests that matter consists of a set of particles that act as building blocks and that between these particles lie forces that are controlled by another set of particles.



A fundamental property of the majority of particles is that they have a mass.



In 1964, Higgs proposed a theory about the existence of a particle that explains why these other particles have a mass.



At the same time, yet separately, Francois Englert and Robert Brout proposed the same theory.



The existence of the Higgs boson was confirmed by two experiments carried out at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012.



The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 was awarded jointly to Higgs and Englert.



"It is an honour to be the recipient this year of the Copley Medal, the Royal Society's premier award," Higgs said.



"Peter Higgs is a most deserving winner of the Copley Medal. I congratulate him. His work, alongside that of Francois Englert, has helped shape our fundamental understanding of the world around us," said Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society.



"The search for the Higgs boson completely ignited the public's imagination, hopefully inspiring the next generation of scientists. The Copley Medal is the highest honour the Royal Society can give a scientist and Peter Higgs joins the ranks of the world's greatest ever scientists," said Nurse.



As well as the Copley Medal, the Royal Society has announced all of the recipients of its awards, medals and prize lectures.



The scientists receive the awards in recognition of their achievements in a wide variety of fields of research.