PROFESSOR Peter Higgs, the joint winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Physics, says he will retire - once he turns 85.
The 84-year-old physicist, who developed his landmark Higgs boson research while working at the University of Edinburgh, also said he turned down the offer of a knighthood because he did not want "that sort of title".
Prof Higgs retired from full-time teaching 17 years ago but has remained active in sharing his knowledge with other scientists.
"I'm proposing to retire at the age of 85, next year," he confirmed.
Prof Higgs was awarded the prize, along with Belgian physicist Francois Englert, for his pioneering work as a young lecturer at Edinburgh University in 1964 on a theory about the existence of a particle that gives other fundamental particles their mass, the so-called Higgs boson.
The Large Hadron Collider at the nuclear research facility (Cern) in Geneva, Switzerland, was built largely in order to test the theory.
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