Britain's Peter Higgs and Belgium's Francois Englert won the 2013 Nobel prize for physics for predicting the existence of the Higgs boson - the particle key to explaining why elementary matter has mass - the award-giving body said on Tuesday.

The two scientists had been favourites to share the 8 million Swedish crown ($1.25 million) prize after their theoretical work was finally vindicated by experiments at the CERN research centre's gigantic particle collider.