Higgs boson

Subject : Science and technology

Section: Mega science

Concept :

Physicists working with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle-smasher at CERN, in Europe, reported that they had detected a Higgs boson decaying into a Z boson particle and a photon.
This is a very rare decay process that tells us important things about the Higgs boson as well as about our universe.

Higgs boson

An electron is a subatomic particle that has mass.
The stronger a particle’s interaction with the Higgs boson, the more mass it has.
A Higgs boson can also interact with another Higgs boson.
The Higgs boson is a type of boson, a force-carrying subatomic particle.
It carries the force that a particle experiences when it moves through an energy field, called the Higgs field, that is believed to be present throughout the universe.
The Higgs boson has a mass of 125 billion electron volts — meaning it is 130 times more massive than a proton.
It is also chargeless with zero spin — a quantum mechanical equivalent to angular momentum.
The Higgs Boson is the only elementary particle with no spin.

Why is the Higgs boson called the ‘God Particle?’

The origin of this is often connected to Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman referring to the Higgs boson as the “Goddamn Particle” in frustration with regards to how difficult it was to detect.

Significance of Higgs boson:

In 1964, researchers had begun to use quantum field theory to study the weak nuclear force (which determines the atomic decay of elements by transforming protons to neutrons) and its force carriers the W and Z bosons.
The weak force carriers should be massless.
Putting mass arbitrarily onto particles also caused certain predictions to trend towards infinity.
Yet, researchers knew that because the weak force is so strong over short distance interactions (much more powerful than gravity) but very weak over longer interactions, its bosons must have mass.
The solution proposed by Peter Higgs François Englert, and Robert Brout, in 1964 was a new field and a way to “trick” nature into breaking symmetry spontaneously.
The field quickly, in just fractions of a second, finds a stable configuration, but this in the process breaks its symmetry.
This gives rise to the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism which grants mass to the W and Z bosons.
What was later discovered about the Higgs field was that it would not only give mass to the W and Z bosons but that it would grant mass to many other fundamental particles.
Without the Higgs field and the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism, all fundamental particles would race around the universe at the speed of light.
This theory doesn’t just explain why particles have mass but also, why they have different masses.