In simple terms, the Higgs boson is the most expensive particle of all time. If , for example, a vacuum tube and a pair of brilliant minds were enough to open an electron, the search for the Higgs boson required the creation of experimental energy, which is rarely found on Earth. The Large Hadron Collider needs no introduction, being one of the most famous and successful scientific experiments, but its core 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 should no longer accept its existence on faith.
Last unknown
What is the Higgs boson and what is the importance of its discovery? Why has he become the subject of so much hype, financing and misinformation? For two reasons. First, it was the last undiscovered particle needed to validate the Standard Model of Physics. Its discovery meant that a whole generation of scientific publications was not in vain. Secondly, this boson gives other particles their mass, which gives it special significance and some “magic”. We tend to think of mass as an internal property of things, but physicists think differently. In simple terms, the Higgs boson is a particle, without which the mass essentially does not exist.
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 their own theories and observations, requiring a new field, the effect of which would apply to the entire Universe. Reinforcing hypotheses by inventing new components of the universe is dangerous. In the past, for example, this led to the creation of the theory of ether. But the more mathematical calculations were made, the more physicists realized that the Higgs field must exist in reality. The only problem was the lack of practical possibilities for observing it.
In the Standard Model of Physics, elementary particles receive mass through a mechanism based on the existence of a Higgs field that permeates all space. He creates Higgs bosons, which requires a large amount 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 rapidly decreases with increasing distance. According to quantum field theory, this means that the particles that participate in its creation - W- and Z-bosons - must have mass, unlike gluons and photons, which have no mass.
The problem is that gauge theories only operate with massless elements. If gauge bosons have mass, then such a hypothesis cannot 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 gives rise to particles called Higgs bosons. Their mass is not specified by theory, but as a result of the experiment it was determined that it is equal to 125 GeV. In simple terms, the Higgs boson with 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 propose these concepts, but, as is often the case 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 should not have mass possessed it. This is a universal medium that gives particles without mass different masses. This violation of symmetry is explained by analogy with light - all wavelengths move in vacuum at 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 Higgs field creates mass due to symmetry breaking. 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, which are otherwise symmetrically massless.
How to explain in simple terms the Higgs boson? Only recently have physicists realized that if the Higgs field really exists, its action will require the presence of an appropriate carrier with the properties due to which it can be observed. It was assumed that this particle belonged to bosons. The Higgs boson in simple terms is the so-called carrier force, the same as the photons that are carriers of the electromagnetic field of the universe. Photons, in a sense, are its local excitations, just 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 tantamount to a direct proof of the existence of the field.
Experiment
Many years of planning allowed the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to become an experiment sufficient to potentially refute the Higgs boson theory. A 27-km ring of heavy-duty electromagnets can accelerate charged particles to significant fractions of the speed of light, causing collisions of sufficient strength to separate them into components, as well as deform the space around the point of impact. According to calculations, with a collision energy of a sufficiently high level, the boson can be charged so that it decays and this can be observed. This energy was so great that some even panicked and predicted the end of the world, while others' fantasies diverged so much 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 refute the predictions, and no signs of the particle were found. Some researchers who participated in the campaign for spending billions of dollars even appeared on television and meekly stated the fact that the refutation of a scientific theory is as important as its confirmation. After some time, however, the measurements began to take shape in the big picture, and on March 14, 2013, CERN officially announced the confirmation of the existence of the particle. There are reasons to assume 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 were able to confirm this. On the one hand, this was a huge victory for science, and on the other, many scientists were disappointed. If someone hoped that the Higgs boson would turn out to be a particle that would lead to strange and surprising regions outside the Standard Model — supersymmetry, dark matter, dark energy — then, unfortunately, this 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.
Higgs boson in simple terms: what is it?
This study finally confirmed that this is the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. It is located in the mass-energy region of 125 GeV, has no spin, and can decay into many lighter elements - pairs of photons, fermions, etc. Thanks to this, we can confidently say that the Higgs boson, in simple terms, is a particle giving mass to everything.
Disappointed with the standard behavior of the newfound item. If its decay was even a little different, it would be connected with fermions differently, and new directions of research would arise. On the other hand, this means that we have not moved a step beyond the Standard Model, which does not take into account gravity, dark energy, dark matter and other bizarre phenomena of reality.
Now we can only guess what caused them. The most popular is the theory of 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 doubling its collision energy to 13 TeV is likely to detect these superparticles. Otherwise, supersymmetries will have to wait for the construction of the more powerful LHC successor.
Further perspectives
So what will be the physics after the Higgs boson? LHC has 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 ordinary matter exclusively through gravity and through the creation of mass, and the value of the Higgs boson is key to understanding exactly how this happens. The main drawback of the Standard Model is that it cannot explain the effect of gravity - such a model could be called the Great Unified Theory - and some believe that the particle and Higgs field can become the bridge that physicists are so desperately trying to find.
The existence of the Higgs boson has been 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 all, to the smallest detail, predictions of the standard model on the properties of the Higgs boson and will be done away with this area of research forever?