CPS 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Cern, Tevatron, British Science Association
Higgs boson
One major ingredient in this model is a hypothetical, ubiquitous quantum field that
is supposed to be responsible for giving particles their masses (this field would
answer the basic question of why particles have the masses they do--or indeed,
why they have any mass at all). This field is called the Higgs field. As a
consequence of wave-particle duality, all quantum fields have a fundamental
particle associated with them. The particle associated with the Higgs field is called
the Higgs boson.
"Because the Higgs field would be responsible for mass, the very fact that the
fundamental particles do have mass is regarded by many physicists as an
indication of the existence of the Higgs field. We can even take all our data on
particle physics data and interpret them in terms of the mass of a hypothetical
Higgs boson. In other words, if we assume that the Higgs boson exists, we can
infer its mass based on the effect it would have on the properties of other particles
and fields. We have not yet truly proved that the Higgs boson exists, however. One
of the main aims of particle physics over the next couple of decades is to prove
once and for all the existence or nonexistence of the Higgs boson."
Another, more extensive response comes from Howard Haber and Michael Dine,
both of whom are professors of physics at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle
Physics at the University of California at Santa Cruz:
"Much of today's research in elementary particle physics focuses on the search for
a particle called the Higgs boson. This particle is the one missing piece of our
present understanding of the laws of nature, known as the Standard Model. This
model describes three types of forces: electromagnetic interactions, which cause
all phenomena associated with electric and magnetic fields and the spectrum of
electromagnetic radiation; strong interactions, which bind atomic nuclei; and the
weak nuclear force, which governs beta decay--a form of natural radioactivity--and
hydrogen fusion, the source of the sun's energy. (The Standard Model does not
describe the fourth force, gravity.)
"In our daily lives, electromagnetism is the most familiar of these forces. Until
relatively recently, it was the only one which we understood well. Since the 1970s,
however, scientists have come to understand the strong and weak forces almost
equally well. In the past few years, in high-energy experiments at CERN, the
European laboratory for particle physics, near Geneva and at the Stanford Linear
Accelerator Center (SLAC), physicists have made precision tests of the Standard
Model. It seems to provide a complete description of the natural world down to
scales on the order of one- thousandth the size of an atomic nucleus.
"The Higgs particle is connected with the weak force. Electromagnetism describes
particles interacting with photons, the basic units of the electromagnetic field. In a
parallel way, the modern theory of weak interactions describes particles (the W and
Z particles) interacting with electrons, neutrinos, quarks and other particles. In
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