The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
Why the ‘God particle’, theorised by Peter Higgs, matters
IT REQUIRED nearly 50 years, and billions of dollars, to detect the Higgs boson in 2012. An elementary particle like electrons, quarks, photons, and neutrinos, the hig gs bo son, is known to imp art mass to every other particle. while its existence was predicted in the 1960s, it was found only in 2012 through experiments carried out at the
Large Hadron Col lid er(LHC ), locatedon the france-switzerland border, the world’s biggest and most expensive machine at the time.
The discovery of the Higgs boson completed the Standard Model of Particle Physics. The model describes all the elementary particles and forces, like electromagnetism, gravitation or nuclear forces, that build up the material part of the world.
However, there are still unexplained bits like dark energy that are outside the realm of the Standard Model.
Who was Peter Higgs?
The man, after whom the particle is named, Peter Higgs, died on Tuesday, aged 94. An extremely shy person, Higgs, who had started out as a molecular biologist, preferred to work in isolation and was not prolific. He never used a mobile phone or the Internet — the landline at his home in Edinburgh was the only way to reach him.
In 2013, on the day the Nobel Prize in Physics was set to be announced, Higgs did a disappearing act. Certain that the previous year’s discovery of the Higgs boson at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), in Switzerland would fetch him the prize, Higgs left his home to avoid the attention. The Nobel Prize Committee, which informs the winners just ahead of the public announcement, was not able to reach him, and Higgs would eventually be informed by a former neighbour who found him strolling on the street.
But Higgs was not the only one behind the prediction of the Higgs boson and the Higgs field. Several people contributed to the idea, and one of them, Francois Englert, shared the 2013 Physics Nobel Prize with him.
Why is Higgs boson called ‘God particle’? The Higgs boson is most commonly known as the ‘God particle’. The expression was first used by Nobel Prize winning physicist Leon Lederman, who wrote a book by that title in the 1990s, about the continuing search for the particle. While Lederman wanted to call his book ‘The Goddamn Particle’ to describe the Higgs boson’s elusive nature, his publishers persuaded him togo in for‘ the god Particle’, instead — a name that has stuck. Many scientists detest this expression due to the partilce acquiring religious connotations in some circles because of that name.
Why does the Higgs boson matter?
Boson is the name given to a family of elementary particles known to be carriers of fundamental forces like electromagnetism. a photon, which carries the electromagnetic force, is a boson. Matter particles, like electrons or protons, belong to the class called fermions.
The Higgs boson is significant as it is the particle which accounts for the mass of every other fundamental particle. Mass is not something that is intrinsic to matter. Fundamental particles like electrons do not have mass within themselves. In the 1950-60s, when the Standard model was still being developed, scientistsreal is ed that the equations did not work if these particles had inherent mass.
It was a mathematical problem that Higgs and several other scientists worked on, and in 1964, separately developed the idea of an all pervasive field, just like an electric or a magneticor gravitational field, in which a massless particle could gain mass. The pre-eminence that Higgs received was mainly because he alone postulated that this mathematical construct, if it were a physical reality, would give rise to a particle, the eventual Higgs boson.
As it became clear later, it is the interaction of the particles with this Higgs field — the way they change the field or get changed by them — that lends them the mass. The greater the interaction, the larger the mass. Different particles interact with this field in different ways, and that is what gives them different masses.
A photon, which is a light particle, does not interact with this field at al landis thus mass less.there are other particles that are mass less as well. but particles like electron sand pro tons, do interact and have masses. The Higgs boson itself interacts with this field, and has mass.
The concepts of the Higgs field and the Higgs particle are not very intuitive, but these are fundamental to our current understanding of how nature works. The main fame for the Higgs boson came from its elusive nature. After nearly five decades of searching, the particle was finally found by the LHC — the world’s biggest particle accelerator.