Higgs Field & Boson

Imagine solving a complicated math equation and finally getting a solution only to find an extra term or a mismatched coefficient. Yup, it can be frustrating. Well, physicists in the nineteen sixties faced a similar problem. Peter Higgs and a handful of other physicists were trying to understand the origin of a basic physical feature: mass. You can think of mass as an object’s heft or, a little more precisely, as the resistance it offers to having its motion changed. Push on a stationary vehicle to increase its speed, the resistance you feel reflects its mass. At a microscopic level, the vehicle’s mass comes from its constituent molecules and atoms, which are themselves built from fundamental particles, electrons, and quarks. But the question was where do the masses of these and other fundamental particles come from?

When physicists modeled the behavior of these particles using equations rooted in quantum physics, they encountered a puzzle. If they assumed that all the particles were massless, then each term in the equations clicked into a perfectly symmetric pattern, like the tips of a perfect snowflake. And moreover, this symmetry was not just mathematically elegant. It explained/matched patterns evident in the experimental data. But physicists knew that the particles did have mass, and when they modified the equations to account for this fact, the mathematical harmony was spoiled. The equations became complex, unwieldy and, worse still, inconsistent.

Here comes the idea put forward by Higgs. Keep the equations pristine and symmetric but consider them operating within a peculiar environment. Imagine that all of space is uniformly filled with an invisible substance or field that exerts a drag force on particles when they accelerate through it. So, say you push on a fundamental particle in an effort to increase its speed, according to Higgs, you would feel this drag force as a resistance. Justifiably, you would interpret the resistance as the particle’s mass.

As an analogy, think of a ping‑pong ball submerged in water. When you push on the ping‑pong ball, it will feel much more massive than it does outside of water. Its interaction with the watery environment has the effect of endowing it with mass. So, with particles submerged in the Higgs field. The Higgs mechanism sets up a field that interacts with particles to endow them with mass, and the Higgs boson is the particle associated with that field — just as photons are associated with an electromagnetic field. For more than four decades, physicists have assumed that the Higgs field existed, but found no experimental evidence for it.

The Higgs boson was finally discovered in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The heavy particles created in the collider exist for just an instant before they decay into a spray of lighter particles. The LHC's physicists had been looking for particular patterns in the spray of particles that matched what they'd expected to see from the decay of the Higgs boson. And there you have it one of the most challenging concepts in Quantum physics explained within 3 minutes.