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 than a zero vacuum expectation value. This non-zero value supposes to break electroweak symmetry, giving mass to the weak force.
Questions about the Higgs hypothesis:
1, The Higgs boson lends mass to the weak force, electrons, and quarks by bumping into them. However, Einstein's general relativity tells us that mass is a permanent particle quality. Therefore, mass can turn into energy by the equation.
E = M C^2
If the mass is an acquired quality, energy is just a figment of the Higgs boson.
2, In the months leading up to the discovery, the media was awash in buzz for the so-called "God" particle. The discovery of the Higgs boson was supposed to solve fundamental questions in physics about our world's structure. Nevertheless, many years after the discovery, we are still waiting...
3, 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 a lighter mass 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 solve the light-mass Higgs problem is yet another field, the axion field. The Higgs mass would depend on the hypothetical axion field's numerical value, which permeates space and time. Axions could relax the value of the Higgs mass to its observed value.
4, The Higgs boson is a massive particle, around 125 GeV – about 130 times the proton's mass at rest – with zero electric charges and spin. Where is Higgs boson mass coming from? At one point, the Higgs field turned on. Conveniently, the Higgs field has a non-zero value, so it can spontaneously break down to give mass to the elementary particles. The idea of the Higgs has only kicked the can down the road. What is your view? Is there a Higgs boson or a Higgs hoax?
A 2014 paper by Belyaev, Brown, Froadi, and Frandsen is a reminder that the Standard Model is unsettled and the discovery of the Higgs Boson is not 100% certain.
Image credit: CERN for the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations
