The Higgs Boson

Nobel Prize Winners Posted on

The Higgs Boson

At CERN on 4 July 2012, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations present evidence in the LHC data for a particle consistent with a Higgs boson, the particle linked to the mechanism proposed in the 1960s to give mass to the W, Z and other particles. (Image: Maximilien Brice/Laurent Egli/CERN)

The Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism

In the 1970s, physicists realised that there are very close ties between two of the four fundamental forces – the weak force and the electromagnetic force. The two forces can be described within the same theory, which forms the basis of the Standard Model. This “unification” implies that electricity, magnetism, light and some types of radioactivity are all manifestations of a single underlying force known as the electroweak force.

Just after the big bang, the Higgs field was zero, but as the universe cooled and the temperature fell below a critical value, the field grew spontaneously so that any particle interacting with it acquired a mass. The more a particle interacts with this field, the heavier it is. Particles like the photon that do not interact with it are left with no mass at all. Like all fundamental fields, the Higgs field has an associated particle – the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson is the visible manifestation of the Higgs field, rather like a wave at the surface of the sea.

Candidate Higgs boson events from collisions between protons in the LHC. The top event in the CMS experiment shows a decay into two photons (dashed yellow lines and green towers). The lower event in the ATLAS experiment shows a decay into four muons (red tracks) (Image: CMS/ATLAS/CERN)

On 8 October 2013 the Nobel prize in physics was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter Higgs “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider”.

Acknowledgements:

“CERN Accelerating Science.” CERN, CERN, 2020, https://home.cern/science/physics/higgs-boson

M. Bileska
Author