Higgs Boson: Find out all about the “God Particle”

It was originally proposed after the Higgs field, named after the British physicist Peter Higgs, Many consider the Higgs boson to be the God particle. In July 2012, a team of scientists was able to use the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). To form a particle, which was later confirmed according to the Standard Model of physics.

The existence of the Higgs boson was predicted by Peter Higgs himself in mid-1964, when he was working with American physicist Philip Anderson. It is not surprising that the Higgs won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013, jointly with Belgian physicist François Englert, for his merit in discovering the Higgs mechanism. any, Although the existence of the Higgs boson was predicted in 1964, it was only officially confirmed during an LHC experiment in 2012..

Hey Bosun The Higgs is one of the seventeen elementary particles in 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 because of that For its fundamental role in subatomic physics and a marketing push, it is called the God particle.

“Even if we find that this is, in fact, the Higgs boson in the Standard Model, to the best of our ability to measure, there are all these other unanswered questions. One of the first questions is: What constitutes the dark matter in the universe?” There is no room in the Standard Model of the Universe for dark matter to be created, so we need to look at other alternative candidates,” Harvey Newman, a professor of physics at Caltech, told the site. spaceExplaining that the discovery of the boson opened the door to other great potential discoveries.

To better explain what the Higgs boson is, TecMundo collected information from scientists and experts in the field. paying off!

The emergence of the Higgs boson

The history of the Higgs boson begins in the 1960s Try to explain how elementary particles in the universe gain mass. Mass is one of the fundamental properties of matter, for example, 99% of the mass of any object in the world arises from the energy that binds elementary particles together. But how do these particles gain mass?

To answer this question, theoretical physicists, including Peter Higgs, have developed 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 the particle is revealed. It's as if someone tried to walk through a puddle of sticky liquid; When you walk through this fluid, you will feel heaviness or mass.

The name “God particle” was not chosen by scientists; in fact, it was another marketing ploy to publish a book about the Higgs boson.source: Getty Images

Higgs mechanism It also shows 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 Brot published another study describing the same mechanism – in other words, science was already moving in “resonance” towards solving this problem.

After reading some material on the subject published around the same time, Higgs added another prediction to his article; He explained that there must be an elementary particle with a very 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 conducted at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

“You and everything around you are made of particles. But when the universe began, no particles had mass; they all moved at the speed of light. Stars, planets and life They can only arise because particles gain 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.

The Higgs boson: the God 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 necessary to show that a global field was responsible for the weight and mass possessed by some elementary particles – its importance was later confirmed by the LHC experiment.

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 him, The boson is responsible for creating the field that permeates the entire universe and determines the mass of elementary particles, such as electrons. It is as if the boson provides strength to the particles that make up the atoms around us.

The discovery of the Higgs boson in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments at CERN has 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 one fundamental force called the switchblade. At the beginning of everything, when the universe cooled before the Big Bang, this force gave rise to the two aforementioned forces.

The name “God particle” was given to the Higgs boson after the publication of physicist Leon Lederman's book. Initially, the book was called “Maldita Particle”, but the editors of the work renamed it “God Particle”. Some people also call the elementary particle this way due to its importance to everything around us. After all, without the attribution of mass nothing in the universe would exist – not even humanity.

Did you like the content? So, stay up to date with all the curiosities about physics here at TecMundo. If you wish, take the opportunity to understand how the Bose-Einstein condensate explains the fifth state of matter.