Higgs boson

From open-encyclopedia.com - the free encyclopedia.

Higgs bosons are hypothetical elementary particles predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. These bosons may play a rather fundamental role: they may be the carrier particles of the Higgs field which is thought to permeate the universe and to give mass to other particles. They have not yet been observed. The Higgs field is the same perceived 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 mass. As of 2004, the best estimate for the mass is 117 GeV, and the theoretical upper limit is 251 GeV. 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 so far is inconclusive. It is expected 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.

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.

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

• List of particles

External links

• Fermilab Results Change Estimated Mass Of Postulated Higgs boson
• Higgs boson on the horizon
• Higgs boson - What is the size of Nothing
• Higgs boson: One page explanation:

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?"

• Higgs physics at the LHC
• Quark experiment predicts heavier Higgs
• The God Particle and the Grid by Richard Martin
• The Higgs boson by the CERN exploratorium

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