4/19/2023 0 Comments Higgs bosonThat theory explains the known elementary particles and their interactions. The particle’s discovery filled in the missing keystone of the standard model of particle physics. In 2010, the LHC began smashing protons together at extremely high energies, while two large experiments, ATLAS and CMS, used massive detectors to look through the debris. But finding the particle had to wait for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. Scientists predicted the existence of the Higgs boson back in 1964, as a hallmark of the process that gives elementary particles mass. Since then, he and thousands of other physicists from around the world working on CERN experiments have gone all out exploring the particle’s properties. “It was a very exciting time to be getting immersed into that world,” he says. Instead, he says, he found himself in the basement, in an overflow room of an overflow room.īut the enthusiasm was still palpable. That space was for VIPs - and those determined enough to wait in line all night to snag a seat. As buzzing throngs of physicists crowded together to watch the announcement at CERN, Duarte didn’t make it to the main auditorium. “I was physically there maybe a week before the announcement,” Duarte says. Duarte was an eager graduate student who’d just arrived at CERN. On July 4, 2012, scientists at the laboratory CERN near Geneva announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, the long-sought subatomic particle that reveals the origins of mass. One important question seems to be: why is there only one such field? Are there other fields out there, also switched “on” and having some impact on our history, or even our day to day lives? Models that describe the Big Bang and the very earliest moments of our universe - now a precision science - suggest that there should be.Javier Duarte kicked off his scientific career by witnessing the biggest particle physics event in decades. There are many questions physicists are still pondering about its nature, such as its mass and outsized role in the universe. The Higgs field and its associated boson is surely the odd duck of the subnuclear zoo. The Higgs Boson - the particle excitation of this field - can be found whenever the particles it gives mass to are colliding at high speeds. Virtually all of that mass comes from interplay of quarks, gluons and the subnuclear goo that surrounds quarks inside of protons and neutrons. A related - but different - effect gives the mass to the W and Z bosons as well.īut do not be fooled! The mass endowed by the Higgs mechanism has almost nothing to do with the mass we experience in daily life. In this way, the Higgs field give a tiny mass to many of the elementary particles. The added resistance to motion through the Higgs field is something we’ve come to call mass. Less like a field and more of a swamp, the Higgs field slows those particles down quite a bit. The field of the Higgs interacts with the quarks and the leptons, like the electron and its neutrino. It’s interactions with matter are more intricate. Although it does interact with the electromagnetic and weak forces. The Higgs does not have an electric charge. That is much longer than the W or Z bosons, but still far too fast for a human to have an intuition for. It’s mean lifetime is somewhere near $10^$ seconds. It decays quickly, most often to a quark/antiquark pair, but has a lot of other options. Like many other heavy particles, the Higgs is unstable. With a mass of 125 GeV, it’s one of the heaviest elementary particles around. When the Higgs does present as a particle, it’s fairly heavy. Unlike a magnetic field, which usually requires some physical source - like a collection of iron atoms in a refrigerator magnet or a spinning particle like the neutron - the Higgs field is naturally always set to “on”.Įvery once in a while, a disturbance in that field appears as a particle, the Higgs Boson. Just as magnetic fields can permeate space, so too does the field of the Higgs. We sometimes call the Higgs’ amorphous presence the Higgs “field”. The relationship between the photon and magnetic fields comes to mind. The Higgs is a difficult particle to describe because it almost always manifests in ways that don’t resemble particle behavior. Listen to this post on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Amazon PodcastsĪs far as we know, there is no other particle like the Higgs Boson, but there probably should be.
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