HIGGS BOS...

Please read previous post “THE STANDARD MODEL OF PARTICLE PHYSICS” in order to get better understanding of this post.

If you have any interest in Physics at all, you might have heard of a particle called GOD particle or HIGGS BOSON, sounds interesting but what makes this particle so interesting? Actually, it isn’t interesting at all. The physicist Leon Lederman called it the "God particle" in 1993. He used this name to get attention and support for experiments to detect the particle. Ridiculous thought. However, most scientists do not like this name, because the particle has nothing to do with any kind of God and the nickname might confuse people and you might be one among those. Before discussing about Higgs boson I would like to stress more on Higgs Field which is the plot and grew to the idea of Higgs Boson.

In 1964, a Physicist named Peter Higgs suggested that there is an energy field that permiated the entire Universe. This energy field is now called Higgs field. The reason he proposed this field was that nobody understands why subatomic particles had a great deal of mass while the others had little and some had none at all. The energy field that Higgs proposed would interact with subatomic particles give them their mass. Very massive particles interact a lot with the field while the mass less particles would not interact at all.

FROM WHERE DOES THIS MASS COME FROM?

To better understand the idea, we can use the analogy of water, fish and swimmers. In our analogy water serves the role of Higgs field. A fish being extremely streamlined interacts only slightly with the field and thus can move through it very easily. The fish would then be similar to a low mass particle in contrast a swimmer can only move very slowly as compared to fish through the water. So swimmer is similar to a massive particle which interact a lot with the water.

The lightest of familiar subatomic particles is the electron while in the subatomic particle world the king of mass is top quark. It weight about as much as an entire gold atom, about 350 times more than the electron. I would like to stress that we believe that top quark is not more massive because it’s bigger. It’s not! Infact we believe that both top quark and electron are exactly of same size. Indeed they both have zero size. The top quark is more massive than electron simply because it interact more with the Higgs field. Actually, if Higgs Field didn’t exist neither of these particles wouldn’t have any mass at all.

But most of the time, we have heard of Higgs Boson but not Higgs Field. How are these two things related? The Higgs Boson is the smallest bit of Higgs Field (just an excitation in Higgs Field).  Just like water is made up of countless H₂O molecules. In order to understand this, here H₂O molecule resembles Higgs Boson whereas the whole water act as Higgs Field.

SPLENDID JOB DONE BY PARTICLE ACCELERAOR IN DETECTING HIGGS BOSON

The field itself is undetectable, but if you could somehow detect the corresponding Higgs particles, you could assume the existence of the Field. And this is where the Large Hadron Collider comes in. The job of a particle accelerator is to convert energy into matter, via the formula e=mc2. By accelerating particles – like protons – to huge velocities, they give them an enormous amount of kinetic energy. In fact, in its current configuration, the LHC moves protons to 0.999999991c, which is about 10 km/h slower than the speed of light.

When beams of particles moving in opposite directions are crashed together, it concentrates an enormous amount of energy into a tiny volume of space. This energy needs somewhere to go so it freezes out as matter (thanks Einstein). The more energy you can collide, the more massive particles you can create.

And so, in 2013, the LHC allowed physicists to finally be able to confirm the presence of the Higgs Boson by tuning the energy of the collisions to exactly the right level, and then detecting the cascade of particles that occur when Higgs bosons decay.

On 12 December 2011, the two teams at the Large Hadron Collider looking for the Higgs Boson, ATLAS and CMS, announced that they had finally seen results which could suggest the Higgs Boson particle existed however, they did not know for certain if this was true.

On 4 July 2012, the teams at the Large Hadron Collider declared that they had discovered a particle which they think is the Higgs boson.

On 14 March 2013 the teams had done much more testing, and confirmed the new particle was a Higgs boson. And Peter Higgs awarded with Nobel Prize for 2013. Great work with great appreciation.

  

FROM WHERE DID THE IDEA OF HIGGS FIELD EMERGED?

Before the Higgs Boson was discovered, the standard model of particle Physics was incomplete. The original Higgs idea was proposed to answer an important question. It was in 1960s, Physicist took an effort to unify weak nuclear force and electromagnetism. One side there is electromagnetic force with infinite range and weakens as square of distance between two charged objects. In contrast, weak nuclear force doesn’t have an infinite range rather it seems to work for distances about one-one thousand that of a proton. Yet scientists were saying that these two forces were one and the same thing. That didn’t make any sense until Higgs Field was discovered. Higgs Field gave mass to the particles that transmit the weak force (i.e. W and Z Bosons) and didn’t give mass to the particle that transits electromagnetism (photon). So this is how Higgs fit into the theory, it gave mass to all the Bosons (gluon, W and Z Boson, photon). Then what about quarks and leptons or we can say fermions which make up most of our matter. From where does these subatomic particles get mass? The original Higgs Field Theory proposed in 1960s gave mass to only Bosons but what if it give mass to fermions too. So the question is does Higgs Field also give mass to Fermions ? Higgs Boson interact more with heavy particle, that is more often you have heard of. But the correct and the better way to say that is the particles that interact more with Higgs Field and Bosons get more mass (point to be noted). It is the interaction with the field that comes first and mass is the consequence.

And that’s how all this Higgs thing came and we understood mass not just as a property of an object rather came out as a consequence. This takes us one step closer in exploring our universe or might be multiverse. Let’s just leave whether it’s a universe or multiverse, above all we got a better and new way of understanding mass. And now HIGGS BOSON is one of 17 fundamental particles of STANDARD MODEL That’s all for this post, soon coming up with more posts. Thank you for reading this post.