The Higgs boson is special kind of particle that doesn’t really appear in everyday life. Instead, it subtly interacts with many other particles and is responsible for giving them mass. Additionally, it plays a crucial role in the determining the characteristics of the forces of nature.
The Discovery of Higgs Boson
In 1964, several researchers, including British physicist Peter Higgs, found a clever solution to a troubling problem in theoretical physics. The problem was that at high energies, two of the forces of nature, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, merge together into a single force. But at low energies, the two forces couldn’t be any different, with different force carriers, ranges, and properties.
This experimental result suggested that there was a deep connection between the forces, but that connection only manifested at high energies, and at low energies something else in the universe was breaking that connection.
Higgs postulated that there was a quantum field that permeated all of space and time, later known as the Higgs field in his honor, that acted to drive this wedge between the forces. The two forces naturally want to blend together, and so they’re able to overcome the Higgs field at high energies. But at low energies the Higgs field takes over, keeping the two forces separate.
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The Significance of Higgs Boson
But Peter Higgs quickly realized that this strange new quantum field had some other amazing properties. The field didn’t just interact with electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force. It also interacted with an entire class of particles known as leptons, which include electrons and quarks – the building blocks of matter.
Specifically, the interaction with the Higgs boson is responsible for the mass of these particles. In other words, without the presence of the Higgs boson, these particles would be massless. One way to visualize this is to imagine the Higgs boson as a thick, viscous soup that fills the universe. All particles want to move at the speed of light, but have to move through this soup, which slows them down – which looks the same as if they had mass of their own. And different particles have different strengths of interaction with the Higgs field, which explains why they have different masses.
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Why Is It Called the “God” Particle?
The Higgs field plays a critical role in our modern theory of particle physics, known as the Standard Model. It simultaneously explains why the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces are separate, and explains why other particles have mass. However, even though it had strong theoretical reasons to exist, decades had gone by without any evidence for its existence.
In 1993 Nobel-prize winning physicist Leon M. Lederman wanted to write a book about the Higgs boson, exploring just how important it was, the mysteries surrounding it, and the frustrations with our inability to detect it. According to Lederman, he wanted to refer to it as the “goddam particle”, but his publisher suggested that call it the “god particle”. The book, with that name in its title, went on to become a huge hit, and the nickname stuck – much to Higgs’ chagrin, who did not like how it might offend religious people and generally confuse the public.
Read More: The Standard Model: The Physics Theory of (Mostly) Everything
Ongoing Efforts to Prove the Higgs Boson
Beginning in the late 1980’s physicists started developing plans to build a particle accelerator capable of detecting the Higgs boson. The Higgs particle, which is a localized intense vibration of the larger quantum field, was predicted to be very massive, which requires a very large collider to potentially find one.
The Superconducting Supercollider, located in Texas, was supposed to do the trick, but after two years of construction the United States Congress pulled the funding, leaving the particle physics community in a bind. It would take another decade before they would be able to develop the Large Hadron Collider, located at the CERN facility in Switzerland.
Finally, in 2012 two experiments at the Collider, the ATLAS and CMS detectors, found a brand new particle matching the exact description of the Higgs boson. Forty years after its prediction, Higgs’ discovery was verified.
Researchers continue to study the Higgs boson, as it might have played an important role in the early universe, and there might be other fields and particles similar to the Higgs that we have yet to discover.
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Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
Britannica. Higgs boson
CERN. Higgs boson
University of Oregon. Leptons
Institute of Physics. The Standard Model
The Nobel Prize. Leon M. Lederman Facts
Energy.gov. DOE Explains...the Higgs Boson
Paul M. Sutter is a theoretical cosmologist, NASA advisor, host of the "Ask a Spaceman" podcast, and a U.S. Cultural Ambassador. He is the author of "Your Place in the Universe" and "How to Die in Space."
