Originally proposed after the Higgs field, named after British physicist Peter Higgs, the Higgs boson is considered by many to be the God particle. In July 2012, a team of scientists managed to use the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) to create the particle, which was later confirmed according to the Standard Model of Physics.
Peter Higgs himself made a prediction of the Higgs boson in mid-1964, when working with the American physicist Philip Anderson. It is no surprise that Higgs was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2013, alongside Belgian physicist François Englert, for his merit in discovering the Higgs mechanism. I.e, Although the Higgs boson was predicted in 1964, it was only officially confirmed during the LHC experiment in 2012..
O boson Higgs is considered one of the 17 elementary particles of the Standard Model of Physics, which attempts to explain the behavior of the building blocks of the universe. The boson in question was the last particle to be discovered and, due to the its fundamental role in subatomic physics and a dash of marketing, it is called the God particle.
“Even if we find that this is, in fact, to the best of our ability to measure it, the Higgs boson of the Standard Model, there are all these other questions that haven’t been answered. One of the first questions is: What makes up the dark matter in the universe? There is no room in the Standard Model of the universe to create dark matter, so we need to look at other alternative candidates,” Harvey Newman, a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology, told the website Spaceexplaining that the discovery of the boson opened the door to other possible great discoveries.
To explain a little better what the Higgs boson is, TecMundo gathered information from scientists and experts in the field. Check out!
Emergence of the Higgs Boson
The history of the Higgs boson begins in the 1960s to try to explain how elementary particles in the universe acquire mass. Mass is one of the most basic properties of matter, for example, 99% of the mass of any object in the world is created from the energy that holds elementary particles together. However, how do these particles acquire mass?
To answer this question, theoretical physicists, including Peter Higgs, developed the theory about the Higgs field, a type of invisible field responsible for permeating everything that exists. In other words, elementary particles interact with this invisible field and thus the mass of a particle manifests itself. It’s as if a person tried to walk through a pool of viscous liquid; When walking through this liquid, she will have the feeling of weight or mass.
The name ‘God Particle’ was not chosen by scientists, in reality, it was more of a marketing ploy for the publication of a book about the Higgs boson.Source: Getty Images
The Higgs mechanism also explains that different elementary particles have different masses due to their different interactions with the Higgs field. In 1964, when Peter Higgs published the theory in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters, Belgian physicists François Englert and Robert Brout published another study describing the same mechanism — in other words, science was already moving in ‘resonance’ towards resolving this issue.
After reading some materials on the topic published around the same time, Higgs added another prediction to his article; he explained that there must be an elementary particle with extremely high mass. Thus, the Higgs boson was proposed. More than 70 years later, scientists were able to prove the existence of the God particle through experiments at the LHC.
“You and everything around you are made of particles. But when the universe began, no particles had mass; they all moved quickly at the speed of light. Stars, planets and life They could only arise because the particles gained their mass from a fundamental field associated with the Higgs boson. The existence of this mass-giving field was confirmed in 2012, when the Higgs boson particle was discovered at CERN,” it is described on the CERN website.
Higgs boson: the Deus particle
The Higgs boson is a subatomic particle that was discovered after applying the Higgs field to the Standard Model of particle physics. At the time it was proposed, it was considered crucial to explaining that an all-pervading field is responsible for the weight and mass that some elementary particles possess — its cruciality was later confirmed with the experiment at the LHC.
According to CERN, the Higgs boson is about 130 times more massive than a proton and has a mass of 125 billion electron volts. Like this, The boson is responsible for creating the field that permeates the entire universe and assigns mass to elementary particles, such as electrons. It’s as if the boson provides strength to the particles that form the atoms around us.
The discovery of the Higgs boson in experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN changed the way scientists observe the Standard Model of Physics.Source: Getty Images
As scientists explain, the Higgs boson can help explain two fundamental forces of nature: the weak force and the electromagnetic force. The Higgs mechanism describes that these forces are manifestations of a single fundamental force, called the electroknife. At the beginning of everything, when the universe cooled before the Big Bang, this force gave rise to the two forces mentioned.
The nickname ‘God particle’ was given to the Higgs boson after the publication of physicist Leon Lederman’s book. Initially, the book would be called ‘Maldita Particle’, but the editors of the work renamed it to ‘God Particle’. Some people also call the elementary particle this way because of its importance for everything that exists around us, after all, without the attribution of mass there would be nothing in the universe — not even humanity.
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2023-12-24 21:00:00
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