On July 4, 2012, CERN announced the discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson.

CERN's Large Hadron Collider is the world's highest-energy proton collider, whereas Fermilab's current accelerators are focused on creating intense proton beams for neutrino physics.

Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam, and Steven Weinberg successfully unified electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, demonstrating that at high energies they merge into a single electroweak force.