There is a big news about the Big Bang today when physicists claimed the 'discovery' of what could be the famed Higgs boson, the so-called 'God particle'. But what exactly is it and why is it important?
The experts at Cern (home of the Large Hadron Collider) have confirmed they may have found the so-called God particle.
What is it ?
The Higgs boson was summoned into theoretical existence to plug a hole in the "standard model" of particle physics. The model has been hugely successful – it can provide explanations and make predictions about how the counter-intuitive quantum world of particles works. But it couldn’t explain one thing – why the universe has mass. It’s a crucial omission because, without it, there’s no gravity and without gravity, the rolling soup of particles spat out by the Big Bang would never have coalesced to form the stars and planets. In fact, nothing would exist.
The Higgs boson is seen as the answer to this problem. It is the physical emissary of an all-pervading field that interacts with matter to give it the mass that the universe so desperately needs.
If we can’t find the Higgs, it means that there is an entirely new set of as yet undiscovered truths waiting to be uncovered – and that’s almost more mesmerising.
The Higgs boson is seen as the answer to this problem. It is the physical emissary of an all-pervading field that interacts with matter to give it the mass that the universe so desperately needs.
If we can’t find the Higgs, it means that there is an entirely new set of as yet undiscovered truths waiting to be uncovered – and that’s almost more mesmerising.
Higg's Theory
The Higgs field is the proposed answer to this mismatch between our equations and what we see. The Higgs field fills all of space, and as the particles try to move through it, their interactions with it cause them to appear to have mass. This slows them down and allows them to bind together into the familiar forms of matter which we observe. This is a completely different picture of nature than the one we instinctively imagine – instead of matter having its own intrinsic properties, and moving about in empty space, many of the properties of matter are actually only due to its interactions with an invisible, all-pervasive field. The properties of “empty” space are crucial to the physicist’s understanding of the world.
The troubling case of the missing mass to explain how things work at a quantum level, physics has the so-called 'standard model'.
Matter don't have enough mass to account for the mass of the whole. It's tike building a spaceship from six Lego blocks that each weigh one gram and discovering the spaceship weighs 500 grams — something doesn't add up. To make matters worse, the standard model says that all matter was born without mass in the Big Bang. So where mass come from?
Matter don't have enough mass to account for the mass of the whole. It's tike building a spaceship from six Lego blocks that each weigh one gram and discovering the spaceship weighs 500 grams — something doesn't add up. To make matters worse, the standard model says that all matter was born without mass in the Big Bang. So where mass come from?
According to the standard model, every object we see or touch is made up of matter, which has mass, and all matter is made up of atoms. Protons and neutrons are orbited by a cloud of electrons. Protons and neutrons are made up quarks and gluons etc
Enter Higgs To explain this, a group of physicists, including Peter Higgs, proposed that the universe is permeated by a sort of invisible force field. As particles travel through this 'Higgs field' they interact with it and appear to acquire mass — the greater the interaction with the field, the greater their mass.
So is Higgs afield or a particle? We know from quantum theory that every field has an associated particle (the so-called 'force carrier'). This force-carrier acts like a messenger that transmits the effect of the field to the particle
So if there is field, a Higgs field, there must be a Higgs particle — since these force-carriers are called 'bosons', this is called the Higgs boson
Enter Higgs To explain this, a group of physicists, including Peter Higgs, proposed that the universe is permeated by a sort of invisible force field. As particles travel through this 'Higgs field' they interact with it and appear to acquire mass — the greater the interaction with the field, the greater their mass.
So is Higgs afield or a particle? We know from quantum theory that every field has an associated particle (the so-called 'force carrier'). This force-carrier acts like a messenger that transmits the effect of the field to the particle
So if there is field, a Higgs field, there must be a Higgs particle — since these force-carriers are called 'bosons', this is called the Higgs boson
