CERN's 2008 Large Hadron Collider is not just the world's largest and most powerful particle collider but also the largest single machine and most complex experimental facility. Here, physicists are able to test fundamental physics theories by smashing particles with extremely high energies. On 8 October 2013 the Nobel prize in physics was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider."