In plain language: the Higgs boson - what is it?

In simple terms, the Higgs boson is the most expensive particle for all time. If an opening of an electron, for example, was enough vacuum tube and a pair of brilliant minds, the search for the Higgs boson required the creation of experimental energy, which is rarely found on Earth. The Large Hadron Collider does not need a representation, being one of the most famous and successful scientific experiments, but its profile particle, as before, is shrouded in mystery for most of the population. It was called a particle of God, however, thanks to the efforts of literally thousands of scientists, we no longer have to accept its existence on faith.

The last unknown

What is the Higgs boson and what is the importance of its discovery? Why did he become the subject of so much fuss, funding and disinformation? For two reasons. First, it was the last undiscovered particle necessary to confirm the Standard Model of Physics. Its opening meant that a whole generation of scientific publications was not in vain. Secondly, this boson gives to other particles their mass, which gives it special meaning and some "magic". We tend to think of the masses as an intrinsic property of things, but physicists think otherwise. In simple terms, the Higgs boson is a particle, without which the masses do not exist in principle.

Another field

The reason lies in the so-called Higgs field. It was described before the Higgs boson, since physicists calculated it for the needs of his own theories and observations that required a new field, the action of which would be extended to the entire Universe. Reinforcement of hypotheses by the invention of new components of the universe is dangerous. In the past, for example, this led to the creation of an ether theory. But the more mathematical calculations were made, the more physicists understood that the Higgs field should exist in reality. The only problem was the lack of practical opportunities for his observation.

In the Standard Model of Physics, elementary particles receive mass through a mechanism based on the existence of a Higgs field that permeates the entire space. He creates Higgs bosons, which requires a lot of energy, and this is the main reason why scientists need modern particle accelerators to conduct high-energy experiments.

Where does the mass come from?

The strength of weak nuclear interactions decreases rapidly with increasing distance. According to quantum field theory, this means that the particles that participate in its creation - W- and Z-bosons - must have a mass, unlike gluons and photons, in which there is no mass.

The problem is that the gauge theories operate only with massless elements. If the gauge bosons have a mass, then such a hypothesis can not be reasonably determined. The Higgs mechanism avoids this problem by introducing a new field called the Higgs field. At high energies, the gauge bosons do not have mass, and the hypothesis works as expected. At low energies, the field causes symmetry breaking, which allows the elements to have mass.

What is the Higgs boson?

The Higgs field generates particles called Higgs bosons. The theory does not specify their mass, but as a result of the experiment it was determined that it is equal to 125 GeV. In simple terms, the Higgs boson, by its existence, finally confirmed the Standard Model.

The mechanism, field and boson are named after the Scottish scientist Peter Higgs. Although he was not the first to suggest these concepts, but, as often happens in physics, he simply turned out to be in honor of whom they were named.

Symmetry breaking

It was believed that the Higgs field is responsible for the fact that particles that have a mass should not have it. This is a universal medium that empowers particles without mass with different masses. Such a symmetry breaking is explained by analogy with light - all wavelengths move in vacuum with the same speed, in the prism each wavelength can be distinguished. This, of course, is an incorrect analogy, since white light contains all wavelengths, but the example shows how the creation of the Higgs field by the mass is due to symmetry breaking. The prism breaks the symmetry of the speed of different wavelengths of light, separating them, and the Higgs field is believed to break the symmetry of the masses of some particles that are otherwise symmetrically massless.

How to explain in simple language the Higgs boson? Only recently did physicists understand that if the Higgs field really does exist, its action will require the presence of an appropriate carrier with properties through which it can be observed. It was assumed that this particle belonged to bosons. The Higgs boson is a simple language - this is the so-called carrier force, the same as photons, which are carriers of the electromagnetic field of the universe. Photons, in a sense, are its local excitations in the same way as the Higgs boson is a local excitation of its field. The proof of the existence of a particle with the properties expected by physicists was in fact equivalent to a direct proof of the existence of a field.

Experiment

Many years of planning allowed the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to become an experiment sufficient to potentially disprove the Higgs boson theory. The 27-km ring of super-powerful electromagnets can accelerate charged particles to significant parts of the speed of light, causing collisions of sufficient force to separate them into components, and also deform the space around the point of impact. According to calculations, at a collision energy of a sufficiently high level, it is possible to charge the boson so that it decays and it can be observed. This energy was so great that some even panicked and predicted the end of the world, and the fantasy of others was so dispersed that the discovery of the Higgs boson was described as an opportunity to look into an alternative dimension.

Final confirmation

The initial observations seemed to actually disprove the predictions, and no evidence of a particle was found. Some researchers who participated in the campaign for spending billions of dollars even appeared on television and humbly stated the fact that disproving the scientific theory is just as important as its confirmation. After a while, however, the measurements began to take shape, and on March 14, 2013, CERN officially announced the existence of the particle. There are grounds for assuming the existence of multiple bosons, but this idea needs further study.

Two years after CERN announced the discovery of the particle, scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider could confirm this. On the one hand, it became a huge victory for science, and on the other, many scientists were disappointed. If someone had hoped that the Higgs boson would be a particle that would lead to strange and surprising areas beyond the Standard Model - supersymmetry, dark matter, dark energy - then, unfortunately, it was not so.

A study published in Nature Physics confirmed the decay into fermions. The standard model predicts that, in simple terms, the Higgs boson is a particle that gives fermions their mass. The CMS collider detector finally confirmed their decay into fermions - lower quarks and tau leptons.

The Higgs boson in plain language: what is it?

This study finally confirmed that this is the Higgs boson, predicted by the Standard Model of Elementary Particle Physics. It is located in the mass-energy region of 125 GeV, has no spin, and can decay into a multitude of lighter elements-pairs of photons, fermions, etc. Thanks to this, we can confidently say that the Higgs boson, in simple language, is a particle , Giving a lot of everything.

The standard behavior of the newly discovered element was disappointing. If its decay was at least a little different, it would be associated with fermions in a different way, and new directions of research would arise. On the other hand, this means that we have not moved one step beyond the Standard Model, which does not take into account gravity, dark energy, dark matter and other bizarre phenomena of reality.

Now you can only guess at what they are caused. The most popular theory is supersymmetry, which claims that each particle of the Standard Model has an incredibly heavy superpartner (thus making up 23% of the universe - dark matter). Updating the collider with a doubling of its collision energy to 13 TeV is likely to detect these superparticles. Otherwise, supersymmetry will have to wait for the construction of a more powerful successor to the LHC.

Further perspectives

So what will be the physics after the Higgs boson? LHC recently resumed its work with significant improvements and is able to see everything from antimatter to dark energy. It is believed that dark matter interacts with the ordinary solely through gravity and through the creation of a mass, and the significance of the Higgs boson is key to understanding exactly how this happens. The main drawback of the Standard Model is that it can not explain the action of gravity - such a model could be called the Great Unified Theory - and some believe that the particle and the Higgs field can become the bridge that physicists are so desperately trying to find.

The existence of the Higgs boson was confirmed, but it is still very far from its full understanding. Will future experiments disprove supersymmetry and the idea of its decomposition into dark matter itself? Or will they confirm everything, to the smallest detail, the predictions of the standard model on the properties of the Higgs boson and with this field of research will be finished forever?