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Higgs bosons are hypothetical elementary particles predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics. These bosons are thought to play a rather fundamental role: according to the Standard Model, they are predicted to be the carrier particles of the Higgs field which is thought to permeate the universe and to give mass to other particles. As of January 2005, no experiment has detected the existence of the Higgs. The Higgs field is perceived the same from every direction and is mostly indistinguishable from empty space.
A special article is dedicated to the Higgs mechanism, a physical phenomenon that is responsible for the spontaneous breaking of the electroweak symmetry.
The Higgs boson, sometimes called the God particle, was first predicted in the 1960s by the British physicist Peter Higgs. The Higgs mechanism for giving mass to particles was actually first proposed in the context of solid state physics to explain how particle-like structures in metals can act as if they had an effective mass.
The Higgs boson itself has a characteristic rest-mass. As of 2004, the best estimate for this mass is 117 GeV, with a theoretical upper limit of 251 GeV. Its discovery would make it the heaviest fundamental particle yet found. Particle accelerators have probed energies up to about 115 GeV, and have recorded a small number of events that could be interpreted as resulting from Higgs bosons, but the evidence is as yet inconclusive. It is expected among physicists that the Large Hadron Collider, currently under construction at CERN, will be able to confirm the existence of Higgs bosons.
Since the Higgs field is a scalar field, the Higgs boson has spin zero.
Alternatives
Alternatives to the (Standard Model) Higgs field
Pop-culture references
In the sci-fi comedy series Lexx, one character points out that although all-out nuclear war sometimes destroys all life on planets as advanced as Earth, it is much more common for such planets to be obliterated by physicists attempting to determine the precise mass of the Higgs boson particle, since the moment the mass is known the planet will instantly be compressed to the size of a pea.
In Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, a crew of scientists find themselves beset by the inexplicable presence of other people, including absent or deceased friends and relatives, on their space station - apparently the creations of an alien phenomenon they are studying. They discover that their visitors, when killed, always return to life, even if they attempt to kill themselves; their struggle to cope with this "problem" embodies one of the important underlying themes of the story. In Steven Soderbergh's 2002 film adaptation, the script (interestingly) references Higgs: "So, if we created a negative Higgs field, and bombarded them with a stream of Higgs anti-bosons, they might disintigrate."
Reference
- The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?, by Leon Lederman, Dick Teresi, ASIN 0395558492 (ISBN 0385312113), Houghton Mifflin Co; (January 1993)
See also
External links
- In 1993, the UK Science Minister, William Waldegrave, challenged physicists to produce an answer that would fit on one page to the question "What is the Higgs boson, and why do we want to find it?"
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