What you get is a propagating wave - a disturbance in the EM field, which we call a photon. The Higgs boson is the fundamental particle predicted by the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism. That's easy to understand if you think in terms of electromagnetism: suppose that you have a very big electric field everywhere: you want to check its properties, so you produce a disturbance in the electric field by moving around a charge. Finding Higgs particles with mass in that. This excitation is what we call the Higgs boson. This Higgs boson is a direct consequence of the Higgs mechanism, proposed by SUPA physicist Peter Higgs (right), which gives mass to the fundamental particles. First, supersymmetry (for experts: more specifically, focus point supersymmetry) predicts that the Higgs particle mass should lie in the range 120-130 GeV.

In order to actually verify this model, we need to produce an excitation of the field. Photons and neutrinos, for instance, don't care about the Higgs. It literally means that the vacuum is filled with something called the Higgs field, and the reason why these particles have mass is because while they propagate, they are swimming in this Higgs field, and this interaction gives them inertia.īut this doesn't happen to all the particles, only to the ones that are able to interact with the Higgs field. In order for the Higgs to be able to give mass to the other particles, it develops a 'vacuum expectation value'.

In this case, the interaction of the W is not done directly, but it's mediated by a spin-0 particle, called the Higgs boson. The way to cure this problem is by adding a particle that mediates the interaction. The problems with the theory of a massive gauge boson is similar to problem of 'naive quantum gravity', when we go to high energies and try to compute the probability of scattering events, we break 'unitarity': probabilities no longer add to 1. Starting with the theoretical background framework, the Standard Model of particel physics, the Higgs field will be introduced as an addition. The elusive particle that physicists knew had to to exist, but took half a century to find. We could just write down the theory and state that these particles have a 'hard mass', but then we'd go into troubles. What is the Higgs boson By Andrew May published 8 March 22. We know that the carriers of the weak interaction - the W and Z bosons - are massless massive (typo). Since the Cern announcement is coming in 1 hour or so, I thought it would be nice to compile a FAQ about the Higgs and let this thread open so you guys could ask further questions.

Higgs boson theory