![]() Just like a massive marble creates more disturbance in the fabric and thus travels slowly, the same goes for elementary particles. The larger the disturbance it creates, the more the speed of the particle is hindered. Therefore, when a particle interacts with the Higgs field or disturbs it in any way, it is interacting with Higgs boson, the particle. In short, any kind of disturbance in the Higgs field is what we know as the Higgs boson. Any kind of disturbance, which in this case is the shift in the fabric, is seen as the Higgs boson particle itself. We all know how a marble would shift the fabric and create a slight dent or shift in it. Now, let’s imagine a particle as a marble moving on this field. Any kind of disturbance in this field-a crease or a wave or a dent-will be the Higgs boson. Imagine a sheet of fabric as the Higgs field. They called this force field the ‘Higgs Field’ source. Physicists Robert Brout, François Englert, and Peter Higgs proposed that the mass must have come from another force that is also responsible for splitting the electroweak force. If they had the same origin, what made the two forces split, such that one gained mass and the other did not? On the other hand, W and Z bosons, the force carriers of weak force, had some of the highest masses in the model. ![]() ![]() However, this was quite strange, because a photon, which is a force-carrier of electromagnetic force, is massless. This meant that both forces had the same origin, which they named the electroweak force. Text and images may be altered, removed, or added to as an editorial decision to keep information current.Standard Model (Photo Credit : ShadeDesign/Shutterstock)īut it was while working on this Standard Model, building quantum field theory for each force, that scientists realized something strange… Two of the fundamental forces, electromagnetic and weak, turned out to have the same quantum field theory. It soon became clear that this same process would work for just about any quantum field the Higgs field explains the masses of a range of other fundamental particles – such as quarks and electrons – which all resist being pushed as they take a moment to treat their sweet tooth.Īll Explainers are determined by fact checkers to be correct and relevant at the time of publishing. Think of the Higgs field as a candy shop, with bosons reluctant to be rushed as they dine on chocolate, only to leave a bunch of short-lived 'Higgs wrappers' in their wake. Having a field with a non-zero value in every corner of the Universe would upset a fundamental balance in quantum mechanics that in theory should generate a kind of particle already ruled out by experiments.īut Higgs, Englert, and Brout showed that if this hypothetical field was linked with the field responsible for the weak force, the troublesome particle nobody had seen would be gobbled up, leaving behind some heavyweight W and Z bosons and a relatively heavy, spin-less, uncharged 'Higgs' boson (that would quickly crumble apart). History recognizes the proposal made by Higgs and colleagues François Englert and Robert Brout in 1964, based on a new type of quantum field that was active everywhere, even throughout empty space. Similar explanations for this split – and the difference in masses – came from several groups of physicists around the world. In 2012, just such a particle was detected by two of the Large Hadron Collider's detectors, officially leading to the Higgs boson's inclusion as part of the Standard Model and providing strong evidence for the Higgs mechanism. It's a relatively heavy, uncharged, highly unstable boson (force-carrying particle, one with zero spin) that exists for a blink before breaking down into any few of a variety of other particles. What is the Higgs boson, then?Īs with all quantum fields, the Higgs field gives rise to its own kind of fundamental particle, the Higgs boson. His name has since become synonymous with the field, its particle, and its mechanism of action. The field's existence was first theorized in the early 1960s, with physicists considering the consequences of a hypothetical field that would explain how electromagnetism and the weak force became separated, and why some force-carrying ( or gauge) particles have mass (like W and Z bosons) while others (like photons) don't.īritish physicist Peter Higgs was one of a number of researchers working on this model.
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