Higgs Boson

• Context (TH): Nobel prize-winning physicist Peter Higgs has passed away at the age of 94. He proposed the existence of the “God particle“, also known as the Higgs boson.

• Peter Higgs and five other theorists proposed the Higgs boson in 1964 to explain why certain particles have mass.
• Scientists confirmed its existence in 2012 through the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland.
• This discovery led to the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics being awarded to Higgs and Englert.
• LHC produces collisions with extremely high energies to replicate conditions after the Big Bang.

Higgs Boson

• It is the fundamental particle associated with the Higgs field, a field that gives mass to other fundamental particles such as electrons and quarks.
• Without it, atoms wouldn’t stick together, and there would be no stars, planets or us.
• According to the Standard Model of particle physics, particles gain their mass by interacting with a field called the Higgs field.
• The Higgs field is hypothesised to exist everywhere in space, even in a vacuum, and has a non-zero value.
• Particles like photons, which make up light, interact weakly with the Higgs field and have no mass.
• Particles like electrons and quarks, which make up protons and neutrons, interact strongly with the Higgs field and acquire mass.
• Experiments conducted at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in 2012 confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson.
• The Higgs boson could lead to discoveries of new particles or reveal connections between forces we never knew existed.

Standard Model of Particle Physics

• The Standard Model comprises 17 fundamental particles. Only the electron and the photon were known a century ago.
• These 17 fundamental particles are categorised into two groups: fermions and bosons.

Fermions – Building Blocks of Matter

• There are 12 fermions, including six quarks and six leptons.
• Quarks and leptons are the basic constituents of matter.
• Electrons, a type of lepton, are familiar particles found in atoms.

Bosons

• Five bosons are responsible for interactions between matter.
• They carry three of the four fundamental forces: strong force, weak force, and electromagnetism.

Roles of Bosons

• The gluon mediates the strong force, binding quarks to form larger particles.
• The W and Z bosons facilitate the weak force involved in radioactive decay.
• The photon carries the electromagnetic force, which is responsible for magnetism, electricity, and atomic interactions.