In July of 2012, the
European Organization for Nuclear Research - CERN - announced that they had discovered a new
particle. The particle had mass, but no electrical charge, and decayed into smaller particles as soon
as it was detected. The particle was the Higgs Boson, or more famously, “the God particle”.
But what exactly is a Higgs boson and why is it called the god particle?
We often hear it said that elementary particles are the building blocks of all matter. However,
our modern understanding of the laws of physics suggests that
particles are not discrete particles or ‘blocks’. Instead, they are continuous,
wave-like entities spread throughout space. We also have a name for these ‘entities’—fields.
You may be familiar with electric and magnetic fields. When a ripple
or ‘disturbance’ forms in this field, we call it a wave—an electromagnetic wave,
to be precise. Visible light, X-rays, and radio waves that let you talk on
the phone and use WiFi are all examples of electromagnetic waves. Hypothetically,
if you could “zoom in” on electromagnetic waves, you would see that they are made of
photons. That’s why we say that photons are the fundamental particles of electromagnetic waves.
The same idea applies to other particles too; for example, there exists an electron
field that is spread thinly throughout space. Ripples in this field get clustered
into a bundle of energy, and we call these bundles of energy “electrons”. Similarly,
there is a quark field, a gluon field, a Higgs field, and so on.
Now, quantum field theory—a theoretical framework that brings together the ideas
of quantum mechanics, special relativity and classical field theory—dictates that
the universe is filled with “quantum fields”. This theory argues that every
particle can be represented by a wave in its corresponding field.
In the year 1964, Peter Higgs, François Englert and four other scientists proposed a rather unique
idea to explain why certain particles had mass. They hypothesized that the entire universe is
filled with an invisible, all-permeating field that gives mass to all elementary particles.
The field in question is called the Higgs field. A wave, ripple or disturbance in
that field is therefore called the Higgs boson, or the Higgs particle.
This theory suggests that particles do not have a mass of their own; rather,
they get their mass by interacting with the Higgs field. How heavy a particle is will be
determined by how strongly a particle interacts with the Higgs field. Electrons, quarks and
other elementary particles interact with the Higgs field in different ways and therefore
have different masses. Photons, however, don’t interact with the field, and thus have no mass.
Now, remember, the existence of the Higgs field was just an idea proposed in 1964 by
a few scientists. After initially facing skepticism from the scientific community,
the idea was later hailed as a brilliant one. However,
for many years, it was exactly that—an idea. No proof for this field existed.
All of that changed on July 4, 2012, when researchers at CERN confirmed the existence
of this “mass-giving” field, because a new particle, the Higgs boson, had been discovered
in the Large Hadron Collider—the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world.
The LHC accelerates protons and charged ions at a speed close to the speed of light and
then smashes them against another beam of elementary particles. This collision
produces massive particles, and the Higgs boson is one of them.
Unfortunately, the Higgs boson doesn’t sit around for long; in fact,
it decays into smaller particles almost as soon as it’s detected.
That’s why it is so difficult to detect massive particles like the Higgs boson.
To understand how exactly particle accelerators help detect new particles, you may want to check
out our video on particle accelerators. The link to the video is in the description.
There are many stories as to why the Higgs boson is called the god particle. Some
researchers believe that it’s responsible for the Big Bang that formed our universe,
and given that the Higgs boson imparts mass to everything, it has been named the god particle.
However, note that the Higgs boson is not the sole reason why everything has mass.
The name ‘god particle’ is particularly infamous in scientific circles; in fact,
a story goes that Leon Lederman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, wanted to title
his 1993 book “The Goddamn particle”, because the Higgs boson was so difficult to detect. However,
the publishers of the book didn’t approve of the name and instead renamed it to “The god
particle”. That name has stuck ever since, much to the dismay of physicists all over the world.
God particle or not, the Higgs boson helped push the limits of our modern understanding
of particle physics, along with our conception of the entire universe and its mysterious beginnings.