In our current description of Nature, every particle is a wave in a field. The most familiar example of this is light: light is simultaneously a wave in the electromagnetic field and a stream of particles called photons.

In the Higgs boson’s case, the field came first. The Higgs field was proposed in 1964 as a new kind of field that fills the entire Universe and gives mass to all elementary particles. The Higgs boson is a wave in that field. Its discovery confirms the existence of the Higgs field.