‘‘God particle’’: The particle that pervades the Universe

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What is it ?

If you know one thing about the Higgs boson, it’s probably that it’s called the “God particle.” Leon Lederman, the physicist who coined that term in 1993 had really wanted to call it the “Goddamn particle” because the Higgs was so hard to pin down.

But that doesn’t really answer the question. The Higgs boson is the particle associated with the Higgs field, an energy field that transmits mass to the things that travel through it. Peter Higgs and Francois Englert theorized way back in 1964 that this is how things in the universe — stars, planets, even people — came to have mass.

Like other elementary bosons — such as photons, the particles of light — the Higgs is a “force carrier.” Instead of carrying the electromagnetic, strong or weak force, it carries mass to all the elementary particles via the so-called Higgs field, which pervades the universe.

How it was found

Nearly a half-century ago, 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 freight train (or a feather) to increase its speed, and the resistance you feel reflects its mass. At a microscopic level, the freight train’s mass comes from its constituent molecules and atoms, which are themselves built from fundamental particles, electrons and quarks. But where do the masses of these and other fundamental particles come from? The Higgs boson was initially discovered as a new particle in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations based on collisions in the LHC at CERN, and the new particle was subsequently confirmed to match the expected properties of a Higgs boson over the following years.

How it works

The Higgs boson does not technically give other particles mass. More precisely, the particle is a quantized manifestation of a field (the Higgs field) that generates mass through its interaction with other particles. But why couldn’t mass just be assumed as a given? The solution formulated by Higgs, Englert, and Robert Brout (who worked with Englert at ULB but is now deceased) proposes that all of space is filled with a field that interacts with the weak force particles to give them mass. It does so because the field is assumed not to be zero in empty space. This nonzero ground state violates a symmetry that is considered fundamental to quantum field theory. Earlier work had shown that this kind of symmetry breaking led to a massless, spinless particle that was ruled out by experiments.

On 8 October 2013 the Nobel prize in physics was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter Higgs “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider”.