A short story about Higgs

Atlas Detector at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Image credit: MAXIMILIEN BRICE/CERN

Professor Higgs was supposed to give a keynote speech at the American Physical Society’s April meeting in 2012, but he did not show up. Physicists sitting around me in the auditorium waiting for Higgs gradually started making a joke that of course, “Higgs cannot be detected.” Later in July of that year, the Higgs Boson was detected at the CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. 

I just read the news that Professor Higgs passed away on Monday, April 8th. His theory, however, will remain one of the most important discoveries in physics of modern times. What is the Higgs boson?

You might take it for granted that every particle should have mass. In fact, photons, the fundamental particles of light, do not have mass. But why is that? And why do other particles such as electrons have mass?

In 1964, Peter Higgs, Francois Englert, and a few other physicists proposed that the Higgs boson is a fundamental particle associated with the Higgs field, which gives mass to other fundamental particles. The idea is that particles do not have their own intrinsic mass, but they acquire their mass by interacting with the Higgs field that is everywhere in space. How heavy a particle is will be determined by how strongly it interacts with the Higgs field. Photons who are massless do not interact with the Higgs field. 

The Higgs particle itself is perceived as a clump in the Higgs field. A particle can be described as a wave-like entity that spreads throughout spacetime. In other words, a disturbance in a field. For example, a disturbance or wave in the Higgs field is called the Higgs particle or the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson completed the standard model of particle physics, already including leptons, such as electron, and quarks.

In 2012, a couple of experiments at CERN proved the existence of the Higgs Boson, 48 years after Higgs proposed his theory. As a result, Higgs and Englert won the 2013 Nobel prize in physics.