Higgs Boson - God particle

Higgs Boson – God particle:Explained

question:-Peter Higgs and Francois Englert have been awarded the Nobel Prize in 2013 for their work towards the Higgs Boson. What is Higgs Boson?

- The Higgs boson, often known as the Higgs particle gives mass to other particles. It has been named after Peter Higgs who conceived of the existence of such a particle, and the it was found in March 2013 which was a part of the Standard Model in physics, meaning it was omnipresent.

- In the Standard Model it is an elementary particle allowing scientists to explore the Higgs field. This field was assumed to have existed in 1960s, a field that cannot be “turned off” and taking a non zero constant value almost everywhere.

- The explanation to some fundamental particles having mass despite the symmetries controlling their interactions being massless, is sought in the confirmation of the presence of the Higgs field. This also answers several other long unanswered puzzles in physics.

- The Higgs boson is often termed as the “God Particle” which is not accepted by many physicists including Higgs. Higgs and Englert, the original researchers have been awarded the Nobel prize in 2013 for their work.

- The Higgs particle is a boson with no electric or color charge nor spin making it unstable, decaying into other particles immediately. It is a quantum excitation of one of the four components of the Higgs field. According to the scientists each of these four fundamental forces have a corresponding carrier particle that acts upon matter. Each of the forces have its own specific bosons.

- The intriguing possibility that the Higgs boson could be responsible for all the mass in the universe captures the imagination where we want to know more about the world.

- Assuming the existence of the Higgs boson, interaction with its field, gives mass to everything that has mass. Similar to the rest of the fields covered by the standard model, the Higgs fields would need a carrier particle to impact other particles, and that particle is known as the Higgs boson.

- July 4, 2012 was the day of a great discovery at the Large Hadron Collider, of a particle which behaves in the manner similar to Higgs. The results though are preliminary with the data and findings up for scrutiny.

Facts:

The Higgs mechanism explains only a small fraction of the mass in the universe.

The term “boson” comes from the name of Indian physicist and mathematician Satyendra Nath Bose.

The nickname “God particle” originated from a book by Nobel laureate Leon Lederman.