In the field of Particle physics, the Higgs Boson discovery is a monumental achievement. Particle physics forms the building blocks of matter, radiation and their interaction in nuclear physics. It is the study of atomic and subatomic particles, such as quarks, electrons, and nuclei, and the forces that cause their interactions. The discovery confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson, a fundamental particle associated with the Higgs field, that gives mass to other particles. It completely confirms the Standard Model and presents the mechanism to give mass to particles.
The Standard Model is a theoretical framework that describes the electromagnetic, weak, and strong nuclear interactions that control fundamental particles. The Higgs boson completes this model by providing a mechanism for particle mass.
The Department of Energy (DOE), US Office of Science, explains that -
“The Higgs boson is the fundamental particle associated with the Higgs field, a field that gives mass to other fundamental particles such as electrons and quarks. A particle's mass determines how much it resists changing its speed or position when it encounters a force.”
The existence of the Higgs Boson was proposed almost 50 years before its discovery, that is, in the 1960s. In 2012, in a collaborative experiment by ATLAS and CMS, the researchers from the two institutes worked at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — the most powerful particle accelerator in the world — located at the European particle physics laboratory CERN, Switzerland. The Higgs Boson gives the best description of the subatomic world as known to mankind.
In nature, every particle is a wave in a field. In 1964 it was proposed that the Higgs field fills the entire universe and gives mass to all elementary particles. The Higgs boson is a wave in that field and all the articles get their mass by interacting with the Higgs field. As per CERN,
“The stronger a particle interacts with the Higgs field, the heavier the particle becomes. Photons, for example, do not interact with this field and therefore have no mass. Yet other elementary particles, including electrons, quarks and bosons, do interact and hence have a variety of masses.”
The mass-giving interaction with the Higgs field proposed by the scientists’ team comprising theorists Robert Brout, François Englert and Peter Higgs is the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism.
When particles interact with each other, a boson, which is a “force carrier” particle, is exchanged. A boson can be described as a wave in a quantum field and an excited electromagnetic field, a Higgs boson is the particle or “quantised manifestation” that arises when the Higgs field is excited. With a mass of 125 billion electron volts, which is 130 times more massive than a proton, the Higgs Boson is a chargeless quantum mechanical equivalent of angular momentum. This means that it is the only elementary particle with no spin.
Without the Higgs field and its boson, other fundamental particles would have no mass in the Standard Model. Nobel physicist Leon Lederman and science writer Dick Teresi coined the term “God particle” to describe the Higgs Boson in their 1993 book "The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?" to describe its elusiveness and significance.
The Higgs Boson continues to be studied and scientists are working on finding new particles in the Higgs field. The Higgs boson plays a fundamental role in helping us understand the vacuum in the universe and how it can be stabilised. It increases access to higher collider energies, and scientists are looking for novel ways to stabilise the Higgs boson mass.
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