The Higgs boson is the fundamental particle associated with the Higgs field. The Higgs boson was proposed in 1964 by Peter Higgs, François Englert, and four other theorists to explain why certain particles have mass. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland confirmed its existence in 2012 through the ATLAS and CMS experiments.
The Standard Model predicts only massless particles, contradicting our experience. The solution was the Higgs boson, which can provide mass. The Higgs boson is the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, which takes a lower non-zero value than a zero vacuum expectation value. This non-zero value is intended to break the electroweak symmetry, thereby giving mass to the weak force.
Questions about the Higgs hypothesis:
1. The Higgs boson, with a mass of 125.35 GeV, is too light to form mass-giving interactions with other particles. To solve this problem, supersymmetry was born. Supersymmetry predicts the existence of extra particles, which would cancel out their Standard Model partners' contributions to the Higgs mass, allowing for a lighter Higgs boson. Thus, supersymmetry extends the Standard Model by predicting a super-partner particle for each known particle. These new particles, which could fix the Higgs boson's mass, explain the Higgs mass problem.
Unfortunately, no supersymmetric particles were observed in collisions at the LHC. However, physicists are very clever and can solve their problems. In the absence of supersymmetry, they proposed the existence of multiverses. According to this idea, the Higgs can take any mass. Therefore, each universe of infinite universes would contain a specific mass Higgs particle. It's reasonable to assume that if there were an endless number of universes, one of them might have a Higgs with the observed mass, and we are lucky to live in the universe with the correct mass.
Another proposed solution to the light-mass Higgs problem involves an additional field, known as the axion field. The Higgs mass would depend on the numerical value of the hypothetical axion field, which permeates space and time. Axions could relax the value of the Higgs mass to its observed value.
2. The Higgs boson is a massive particle, around 125 GeV – about 130 times the proton's mass at rest – with zero electric charge and spin. Where is the Higgs boson mass coming from? If the Higgs mass comes from the Higgs field, which must turn on to impart mass to elementary particles. Has the celebrated Higgs boson merely replaced the mass problem with more intractable ones? Kicking the can down the road to an invented field with a non-zero value to give other particles mass feels like an infinite regress.
3. In the months leading up to the discovery, the media were awash in buzz for the so-called "God" particle. This media frenzy created highly unrealistic expectations. While
the particle detected at 125 GeV is undeniably real, the theoretical
edifice built around it creates
as many profound questions as it answers. Although the discovery was supposed to complete the Standard Model, it did not unlock a "Theory of Everything" or answer fundamental questions in physics about the structure of our world.
The 2014 paper by Belyaev and colleagues reminds us that questions about the Standard Model and the discovery of the Higgs Boson remain. What is your view? Is there a Higgs boson or a Higgs hoax?
Image credit: CERN for the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations
Copyright © 2021 by Eva Deli
