Everyone knew something big was coming. Students had camped outside CERN’s designated seminar hall overnight in the hope of grabbing one of the few unreserved seats. Finally, on the morning of 4 July 2012, the suspense was ended. Spokespeople for the large hadron collider’s two general purpose experiments, ATLAS and CMS, confirmed the rumours: both experimental teams had detected a “Higgs-like particle” and the masses were very similar.

In the July episode of the Physics World Stories podcast, Andrew Glester revisits that historic day in 2012. He’s joined by two guests who were there at the particle physics lab in Geneva to live through that memorable day. Achintya Rao was a communications officer at the CMS experiment and Cristina Botta was a research scientist.

Discover much more about the past, present and future of particle physics in the July issue of Physics World, a special issue to mark the 10-year anniversary of the Higgs boson discovery.