The morning of 4 July 2012 was one of excitement. It was the day when the discovery of ‘Higgs boson’, the god particle, was announced at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). For forty years, three generations of scientists and researchers had been trying to prove the existence of this particle and finally they were successful. A key figure in this discovery was Dr Ashutosh Kotwal, a co-recipient of the 2013 High Energy and Particle Physics Prize from the European Physical Society, who conducted world-leading research into the W boson, which helped predict the mass of the Higgs boson. Dr Kotwal’s measurement provided one of the most powerful tests of the Higgs boson theory. And, more recently in 2022, he led a team of 400 scientists to publish the world’s best measurement of the W boson mass, which became the year’s most-cited research paper in physics and astronomy worldwide.

Written by his mother Manik Kotwal and translated by Jerry Pinto, Beyond the Higgs Boson–first published in Marathi as Putra Vhava Aisa to great acclaim–details Ashutosh’s life from childhood to present day and describes in exciting detail the search for the Higgs boson and beyond.

A unique take on a son’s life through the eyes of his mother, interspersed with photographs that bring alive his story, this biography is an inspirational and compelling tale of how a boy from India made it to the forefront of research in physics.