Britain's Peter Higgs and Francois Englert of Belgium won the Nobel Prize for physics on Tuesday for predicting the existence of the Higgs boson particle that explains how elementary matter attained the mass to form stars and planets.

On Monday, James  Rothman, Randy Schekman and Thomas Sudhof won 2013 Nobel prize for medicine.

Half a century after the original work done by Higgs and Englert, the new building block of nature was finally detected in 2012 at the CERN research centre's giant, underground particle-smasher near Geneva. The discovery was hailed as one of the most important in physics.

The two scientists had been favourites to share the 8 million Swedish crown ($1.25 million) prize after their theoretical work was vindicated by the CERN experiments.