Final answer:
Evidence of the Higgs boson was provided by detecting its decay products after high-energy proton-proton collisions at the LHC, confirming its existence as predicted by the electroweak theory.
Step-by-step explanation:
Particle collisions provided evidence of the Higgs boson by detecting the decay products of this elusive particle. At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), high-energy proton-proton collisions were analyzed, which resulted in the identification of a particle that matched the properties of the Higgs boson as predicted by the electroweak theory. The observation of this particle, which helps explain the origin of mass in fundamental particles, was a groundbreaking discovery in the field of physics. Scientists observed and measured the decay products rather than directly observing the Higgs boson itself, which is extremely unstable and decays almost immediately after its formation.
The confirmation of the Higgs boson's existence at CERN in 2012 culminated in the awarding of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics to theorists François Englert and Peter Higgs. They had proposed the mechanism of this particle's involvement in imparting mass to other particles nearly half a century earlier, marking a monumental moment in scientific research and validating the predictions of the Standard Model of particle physics.