Higgs boson
Origin
Peter W. Higgs b1929 British physicist
Definition
- 1: a hypothetical elementary particle that has zero spin and large mass and that is required by some gauge theories to account for the masses of other elementary particles
Description
The Higgs boson or Higgs particle is a proposed elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics. The Higgs mechanism is the simplest of several proposed ways to explain how certain elementary particles have mass. According to this explanation, these particles acquire mass by interacting with this Higgs field, which has non-zero strength everywhere, even in otherwise empty space. A matching boson—the smallest possible excitation of this field—is predicted to exist by the same theory, and as this would be detectable, it has been the target of a long search in particle physics. One of the primary goals of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland—the most powerful particle accelerator and one of the most complicated scientific instruments ever built—was to test the existence of the Higgs boson and measure its properties which would allow physicists to confirm this cornerstone of modern theory.
The Higgs boson is named for Peter Higgs who, along with two other teams, proposed the mechanism that suggested such a particle in 1964. In mainstream media it is very often referred to as "the God particle", after the title of Leon Lederman's book on the topic (1993). Although the proposed particle is both important and elusive, the epithet is strongly disliked by physicists, who regard it as misleading exaggeration.
According to the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a boson, a type of particle that allows multiple identical particles to exist in the same place in the same quantum state. It has no spin, electric charge, or colour charge. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately. If the Higgs boson were shown not to exist, other "Higgsless" models would be considered. In some variants of the Standard Model there can be multiple Higgs bosons.
On 4 July 2012, the CMS and the ATLAS experimental teams at the LHC independently announced that they each confirmed the formal discovery of a previously unknown boson of mass between 125–127 GeV/c2, whose behaviour so far was "consistent with" a Higgs boson, while adding a cautious note that further data and analysis were needed before positively identifying the new particle as being a Higgs boson of some type. [1]
