Three articles by Peter Higgs
But it was not his academic work that brought him worldwide fame, but his theoretical predictions, which today form the basis of the standard model of the universe. Already in the 1960s, Peter Higgs focused his attention on the problem of mass in physics. He developed the idea that massless particles at the beginning of the universe gained mass as a result of interaction with a field that we today call the Higgs field. The scientist believed that the entire space-time was permeated by such a field, which was a form of binder for all matter, giving mass to all elementary subatomic particles that interact with it. Assuming the existence of the theoretical Higgs Mechanism, it was possible to acknowledge the existence of the Higgs field, which in theory allowed to give mass to quarks and leptons.
Nobel Prize for the divine particle
François Englert and Peter W. Higgs were honored for their theory explaining the creation of matter – writes Krzysztof Urbański.
This concept was not Higgs’ original idea, but a development and improvement of the concept proposed by the Japanese theorist and Nobel Prize winner Yoichiro Nambu from the University of Chicago. The Japanese scientist proposed a theory known as spontaneous symmetry breaking based on Goldstone’s theorem, according to which the breaking of global symmetry causes the appearance of a massless boson. Peter Higgs decided to put some order into this concept. One day in 1964, after returning from a mountain picnic, he sat down at his desk and wrote a short paper in which he exploited a loophole in Goldstone’s theorem and suggested that massless Goldstone particles need not appear when local symmetry is spontaneously broken in the theory relativistic. Higgs published the paper in Physics Letters, a physics journal published at CERN in Switzerland.
The scientist believed that the entire space-time is permeated by a field that is a form of binder for all matter, giving mass to all elementary subatomic particles that interact with it.
Encouraged by this publication, he wrote another article in which he described the theoretical model of the interaction, which is now called the Higgs mechanism. However, this article was rejected by the editors of Physics Letters. The editorial board found the text to have “no obvious connection with physics.” However, the stubborn scientist could not be discouraged. Peter Higgs not only sent his article to another prestigious scientific journal, Physical Review Letters, but added a very important paragraph to it. He predicted the creation of a new massive zero-spin boson, which we now know under two names: the Higgs boson or the God particle.
But Peter Higgs was right
It is worth noting that not only Peter Higgs predicted the existence of such a particle that connects all our matter in the universe. Other great physicists of the time, such as Robert Brout, François Englert, Gerald Guralnik, CR Hagen and Tom Kibble, also postulated the existence of such a mechanism.
