Higgs’ Boson — From Mysterious to Momentous
In expression of his frustration over being unable to identify a trail to the elusive Higgs’ Boson, Nobel laureate Leon Lederman famously dubbed it the God Particle in his book titled the same. From there, it took two decades and an expense enumerating billions of dollars, for the God Particle to lift its veil in 2012. Scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider on CERN’s ATLAS and CMS experiments reported the discovery of a particle with mass equivalent to 126GeV of energy, similar to what had been proposed at the time regarding the Higgs mechanism.
Why this discovery was made more than a half-century after it was first suggested was because it required a supremely powerful particle accelerator, one that could potentially sustain ultra high energies and would be luminous enough to pick up decay signatures despite the very short time-frame in which to do so. And so, scientists accelerated two beams of particles at very high speeds in the LHC, in hopes of administering a collision that would result in a Higgs’ Boson as one of its products. In spite of the fact that a Higgs’ Boson decays soon after its formation, the particle accelerator can regenerate information about the decay in order to determine if a Higgs’ Boson had been formed at any stage in the process.
It was in response to this official discovery, that the next year Peter Higgs was awarded a joint Nobel Physics accolade, together with François Englert, “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles…”. Or in layman’s terms, the Higgs’ Boson is responsible for matter in the Universe acquiring mass.
Peter Higgs is a British theoretical physicist, who in the 1960s, postulated that all particles were born massless at the instant of the Big Bang. And it was a few seconds later that they acquired mass, owing to the existence of one Higgs’ Field that traverses the entire Universe. The Higgs’ Field also had magnitude 0 at the instant of the Big Bang, but as temperatures subsequently went down, it gradually and uniformly infused itself into the fabric of the Universe. As the field spread, anything that came into contact with it attained mass — sustained contact meant greater mass. This was accomplished via a process known as symmetry breaking — in the sense that all particles had been massless (and could be considered a single uniform and symmetrical entity) before they trespassed into the Higgs’ territory, after which each acquired a different mass of its own. We can thus iterate that photons would not interact with this field at all, as they always remain massless. The Higgs’ Field, as does every other force field in line with wave-particle duality, cultivates itself in a corresponding particle — its carrier or quantum. Think of it as a physical chunk of matter representing the whole field. As for the Higgs’ Field, its associated quantum is termed the Higgs’ Boson.
Elementary particles are categorized into fermions and bosons: fermions have half-integer spins, while bosons harbor an integer value of spin (think of spin as the physical manifestation of a particle’s angular momentum). The Higgs’ Boson carries 0 spin and charge, and is further classified as scalar, which entails it has no individual direction, it is dimensionless. It is memorable for being recognized as another fundamental constituent of the Standard Model of Particle Physics, being the 17th member to join the clan.
There is a lot in our vicinity we attribute to the Higgs’ Boson, in particular the Higgs’ Effect it has on massless particles. Understand here that the Higgs’ Boson does in no way create mass for particles; instead, it converts its stored energy into mass that is then induced into the particle. Moving forward, let us reflect and analyse one of the more common occurrences around us in hopes of better assimilating what we know of the Higgs’ Effect. If you are attempting to push a trolley of blocks, you would find it more difficult to move a heavier trolley compared to a lighter one. The same is true for particles pervading a Higgs’ Field: particles that have acquired more mass would be slowed down a greater extent, pulling down their speeds further from the universal speed of light limit. To imagine this in a more technical yet concrete light, let us revert back to Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence equation. As energy remains conserved, mass and speed would share an inverse relationship, and consequently, this would give us the same result as the one we drew just above. This cycles back to yet another rudimentary characteristic of the Universe: at 0 mass, particles (like the photon) would be able to reach and travel at the speed of light. In case you were wondering why you yourself can never accomplish that feat, it is simply because you have mass!
Stemming from the fact that you have mass, you would also exert and experience the force of gravity. And so we can conclude that gravity too is intrinsic to the Higgs’ Effect; its strength positively correlates to the magnitude of the field. The fact that gravity is far weaker than the other three fundamental forces of nature (strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces) has been quite the conundrum for physicists to contest. Multiple explanations have arisen over the years, and a new theory emerged in the aftermath of the detection of the Higgs’ Boson in 2012. This theory outlined how a multitude of Higgs’ Bosons were birthed as a result of the Big Bang, encompassing a range of energies, and hence masses. Out of these, the heavier ones were unstable and have undergone decay into their smaller counterparts, in the 13.8 billion years since. As a result, only lighter Higgs’ Bosons remain in existence today - as was the one detected in the LHC in 2012 - and are a potential reason why we are living in a rather gravity-weak Universe. And even though this notion is yet to be proven experimentally, it is still a significant attempt to understand how gravity plays a part in matter-dark matter interactions, especially because the Standard Model offers no resolution in the matter otherwise.
To conclude, let us think of the repercussions the Higgs’ Boson could potentially have on us and on our future. As a carrier of a staggering 126GeV of energy, we can be assured it entails something big! A catastrophe it is indeed, for particle physicists have hypothesized that such a tremendous amount of energy would make the Universe incredibly unstable at the very least. And then again, the Higgs’ Field has been in existence for over 13.8 billion years now, which is so long that we should expect it to undergo energy fluctuations regularly — quantum fluctuations. Such quantum fluctuations prevail as a result of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which outlines how energy is never fixed at a point in space, and constantly varies between two extremes. What this means for the Higgs’ Field is that it may get trapped in what is known as a false vacuum, containing minimum energy, which during the energy fluctuations can create a pocket of vacuum. Here again, we shall revise the fact that the Universe is expanding, and so can this pocket of vacuum till it has swollen enough to consume the entire Universe, and everyone and everything unlucky enough to be dwelling inside. Stephen Hawking has claimed that this process is highly unpredictable, as there is no empirical evidence of its existence as yet: it could initiate millions of years from now or be on its way to us right now!
Only time will tell what the discovery of the Higgs’ Boson means for mankind.
