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The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics was jointly awarded to Francois Englert and Peter Higgs for their contributions to the development of the Higgs field and Higgs boson hypotheses. Their study detailed why elementary particles have mass and formed the basis for the Standard Model of particle physics, unifying both the weak and strong electromagnetic forces. Numerous concerns of particle physics depend on the existence of particle mass. The discovery of the Higgs boson is historic since it established the presence of the Higgs field, which is essential to the Standard Model and many other particle physics theories.
What Is a Higgs Boson?
The Higgs boson is one of the 17 fundamental particles that constitute the Standard Model of particle physics, the best scientific hypothesis on the behaviour of the building blocks of the universe. It is often called the “God particle” because it is significant in subatomic physics.
The Higgs boson is the elementary particle related to the Higgs field that imparts mass to other elementary particles like quarks and electrons. When a particle is subjected to a force, its mass decides how much it affects its speed or position. All elementary particles do not have mass, such as Photon, which carries electromagnetic energy but lacks mass. A particle’s mass is the amount of inertia that defines its presence at any given location.
What Is a Higgs Field?
As proposed by Peter Higgs in 1964, the Higgs field is the field of energy that permeates the universe. The Higgs field is an invisible field where elementary particles gain mass after interacting with it. Diverse particles, like electrons, quarks, photons, etc., have varying mass because the Higgs field does not affect them equally. The greater a particle’s binding strength to the Higgs field, the bigger its mass.
Physicists had a solid theory about electromagnetic and weak nuclear interactions in the early 1960s. However, deep similarities were discovered between the two. Still, a theoretical approach at a higher level demanded that particles be massless, given the reality that particles in nature had mass. In 1964, Peter Higgs presented his original manuscript about the Higgs field (then unnamed) to the journal Physical Review Letters. He revised his paper and added a new prediction that a new elementary particle should be linked to the Higgs field. It belonged to a new class of elementary particles known as bosons, possessing high mass. This particle was later named the Higgs boson.
The Discovery of the Higgs Boson
Higgs’ hypothesis proved to be appealing for the masses of all elementary particles. The only way to confirm the theory was to examine a Higgs boson. The Higgs boson was anticipated to be unstable, breaking into numerous particles in a microsecond. By subatomic standards, its enormous mass meant that only extremely high-energy collisions could produce it. Observing the Higgs boson was one of CERN’s primary goals when it built the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.
When the LHC started in 2008, scientists only knew of the Higgs Boson because its mass had to be larger than 114 billion electron volts (eV). The LHC stood up to the challenge, with a growing number of observations showing a Higgs-like particle of about 125 billion eV. CERN announced the discovery of the Higgs boson on July 4, 2012, 50 years after its initial proposal.
Francois Englert and Peter Higgs won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for their theoretical discovery of the Higgs mechanism, which contributed significantly to the origin of the mass of subatomic particles and confirmed the discovery of the Higgs boson fundamental particle. The discovery was historic because it established the existence of the Higgs field, required for the Standard Model and many other particle physics theories.
Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
LHC was constructed to determine what is the Higgs field, how it operates, and whether it is elementary or composite. The LHC was designed to accomplish much more than identify the Higgs Boson. In Switzerland and France, scientists built the world’s most powerful and largest particle accelerator in an underground tunnel of 100m. They propelled protons around the LHC’s 17-mile ring of superconducting magnets with the energy of up to 7 TeV. Scientists examined the speeding particles after slamming them together for signs of a degraded Higgs. The discovery of the Higgs boson was announced after two years of operation and over 300 trillion unique collisions.
Conclusion
The standard model of particle physics proposed the concept of Higgs Boson. As per this theory, the Higgs field comprises fundamental particles known as Higgs Bosons. Elementary particles gain mass through interactions with the Higgs field. Similarly, the Higgs boson gains mass in the same way. It is called the “God Particle” because it is the basis of the formation of atoms and keeping the universe in order. CERN built the LHC to learn what is a Higgs boson and declared the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, after years of experiments.
