GOD PARTICLE
WHY IN INEWS?
Physicist Peter Higgs passes away. The man, after whom the particle (HIGGS BOSON) is named, Peter Higgs, Died on Tuesday (April 9) aged 94.
WHEN WAS THIS PARTICLE FOUND?
It required nearly 50 years, and the world’s biggest and most complex machine, to detect the higgs boson in 2012.
Its existence was predicted in the 1960s, but it was found only in 2012 through elaborate experiments carried out at the Large Hadron Collider, located on the border of France and Switzerland, the world’s biggest and most expensive machine till then.
WHAT IS HIGGS BOSON?
An elementary particle like electrons, quark, photons or neutrinos, the higgs boson, is known to impart mass to every other particle.
The discovery of the Higgs boson completed what is known as the Standard Model of Particle Physics, which describes all the fundamental particles, like electrons and protons, and the forces, like electromagnetism, gravitation or nuclear forces, that build up the material part of the world.
BOSONS & FERMIONS
Boson is the name given to a family of elementary particles that are known to be carriers of fundamental forces like electromagnetism. photon, which carries the electromagnetic force, is a boson.
On the other hand, the matter particles, like electron or protons, belong to the class called fermions.
WHY IT IS NAMED AS GOD PARTICLE?
Much of the hype surrounding the Higgs boson amongst the common people comes from the fact that it got dubbed as the ‘God particle’. The expression was first used by Nobel Prize winning physicist Leon Lederman who wrote a book by that title in the 1990s about the continuing search for the Higgs boson.
Lederman wanted to call his book ‘The Goddamn Particle’ to describe the elusive nature of the higgs boson, but was persuaded by the publishers to go in for the God particle, a name that stuck.
Many scientists detest that expression, mainly because the particle acquired religious connotations in some circles because of that name.
SIGNIFICANCE OF HIGGS BOSON
The big significance of Higgs boson is that it is the particle that is supposed to account for the mass of every other fundamental particle.
ISN’T MASS INTRINSIC TO MATTER?
Strange as it appears, mass is not something that is intrinsic to matter. Fundamental particles of matter like electrons or protons do not have mass within themselves.
In the 1950s and 1960s, when the Standard Model was still being developed, scientists realised that the equations did not work if these particles had inherent mass.
It was a mathematical problem that higgs and several other scientists worked upon.
PETER HIGGS CONTRIBUTION
The pre-eminence that Higgs received was mainly due to the fact that he alone postulated that this mathematical construct, if it indeed was physical reality, would give rise to a particle, the eventual Higgs boson.
As it became clear later, it is the interaction of the particles with this Higgs field — the way they change the field or get changed by them — that lends them the mass. Greater the interaction, larger is the mass. Different particles interact with this field in different ways, and that is what gives them different masses.
A photon, which is a light particle, does not interact with this field at all, and is thus massless. There are other particles that are massless as well. But particles like electrons and protons, do interact, and have masses. The Higgs boson itself interacts with this field, and thus has mass.
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