The spectacular discovery at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of a Higgs-like particle with a mass of about 126 GeV, which has recently been announced by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations, marks a milestone of an effort that has been ongoing for almost half a century and opens up a new era of particle physics.
It will be discussed in this seminar what is known about this new particle up to now and what the implications are for its theoretical interpretation. The future prospects in the quest for identifying the underlying nature of electroweak symmetry breaking will also be addressed.
