Physicist Peter Higgs passes away: What is the ‘God particle’, which he theorized in the 1960s?

Subject: Science and tech

Section: Nuclear Sector

Context:

Nobel prize-winning physicist Peter Higgs, who proposed the existence of the so-called “god particle” that helped explain how matter formed after the Big Bang, has died at age 94.

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It required nearly 50 years, and the world’s biggest and most complex machine, to detect the Higgs boson in 2012.
An elementary particle like electrons, quark, photons or neutrinos, the Higgs boson, is known to impart mass to every other particle.
Its existence was predicted in the 1960s, but it was found only in 2012 through elaborate experiments carried out at the Large Hadron Collider, located on the border of France and Switzerland, the world’s biggest and most expensive machine till then.
The discovery of the Higgs boson completed the Standard Model of Particle Physics, which describes all the fundamental particles, like electrons and protons, and the forces, like electromagnetism, gravitation or nuclear forces, that build up the material part of the world.

God Particle:

Much of the hype surrounding the Higgs boson amongst the common people comes from the fact that it got dubbed as the ‘God particle’.
The expression was first used by Nobel Prize winning physicist Leon Lederman who wrote a book by that title in the 1990s about the continuing search for the Higgs boson.
Many scientists detest that expression, mainly because the particle acquired religious connotations in some circles because of that name.

Boson is the name given to a family of elementary particles that are known to be carriers of fundamental forces like electromagnetism.
Photon, which carries the electromagnetic force, is a boson.
On the other hand, the matter particles, like electrons or protons, belong to the class called fermions.
The big significance of the Higgs boson is that it is the particle that is supposed to account for the mass of every other fundamental particle.
A photon, which is a light particle, does not interact with electric and magnetic fields at all, and is thus massless.
There are other particles that are massless as well.
Particles like electrons and protons, do interact, and have masses.
The Higgs boson itself interacts with this field, and thus has mass.
The concepts of the Higgs field and Higgs particle are not very intuitive, but these are fundamental to our current understanding of the way nature works.
The main fame for the Higgs boson came from its elusive nature.
Scientists kept frantically searching for it for more than four decades but could not find it.
One of the main science objectives of the LHC, which is the world’s biggest particle accelerator and cost about US$ 9 billion to build, was to find the Higgs boson.