What’s the importance of the higgs Boson?
“Going beyond the Standard Model, the higgs could hold the key to many important
mysteries in particle physics”
Within the Standard Model of particle physics the higgs boson is the only fundamental particle without any intrinsic spin, allowing its interaction with itself and the other particles to generate the mass for other fundamental stuff like electrons and quarks.
Going beyond the Standard Model, the higgs could hold the key to many important mysteries in particle physics. For example, the higgs couples to vacuum fluctuations that should give it a mass near the planck scale, where gravity becomes strong. Instead, the higgs mass of 125 GeV (gigaelectronvolts) is 17 orders of magnitude smaller. We suspect that some as-yet-undiscovered physical mechanism is responsible. popular candidates like simple supersymmetry or extra dimensions have not yet been discovered at the Large hadron Collider.
These theories could produce unexpected LhC signatures such as neutral long-lived particles (LLps) that are only visible once they decay to known particles. Luckily the LhC can search for these LLps since they should occasionally be produced in exotic decays of the higgs boson, and this possibility is coming under increased experimental scrutiny.
Finally, these theories could also leave their trace by modifying the cosmic microwave background or the distribution of dark matter in our Milky Way galaxy in subtle ways.
The future of particle physics may lie at this interdisciplinary frontier, tying together the results from collider experiments with cosmological and astrophysical observations.