The Higgs boson is a fundamental particle in physics, discovered in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider. It is associated with the Higgs field, which gives mass to other particles through a process called electroweak symmetry breaking. The existence of the Higgs boson helps explain why some particles, like protons and neutrons, have mass while others, like photons, do not. Its discovery confirmed a key part of the Standard Model of particle physics, enhancing our understanding of the universe's fundamental structure.