Why do some subatomic particles have a great deal of mass? If you were floating in space far away from earth would have weight? If mass is energy, what is the mehanism that confers this energy to these fundamental particles?
- Higgs Boson is the smallest bit of the Higgs field – just like water made up of H2O molecules – the Higgs Field consist of countless Higgs Bosons.
- Discovered in 2012 at the Hadron Collider, Higgs field gives mass to elementrary particles, allowing them to form atoms and molecules.
- Without it, particles like electrons would be massless and move at the speed of light, making the formation of matter as we know it impossible.
- The discovery of it completed the Standard model – explaining the behavior of all known elementary particles and the 3 of the four fundamental forces – excluding gravity.
- To understand the idea why some subatomic particles have a great deal of mass while others are light or have none, we can use the analogy of water and swimmers.
- The water serves the role of the Higgs field. A fish being streamlined, interacts only slightly with the field and can move through it very easily – the fish would be similar to a low-mass particle.
- In constrast, a human being can only move very slowly through the water – the human being is a massive particle made massive by interacting a lot with the water.
- The mass of your body cames from all the atoms in your body – the mass of the atoms at it’s core is really energy – If you were floating in space far away from earth, you would have essentially no weight, but you would still have same mass as you did on earth.
- The the lightest of the subatomic particle is the electron, while the king of mass in the subatomic world is the top Quark – 350k times more than the electron.
- The top Quark is more massive not because it’s bigger, infact we believe both the top quark and the electron are exactly the same size – it’s massive because it interacts more with the Higgs field – if the Higgs field didn’t exist neither of these particles would have any mass at all.
- To understand how the Higgs field works, we have to first understand what the standard model of particle physics is trying to tell us.
- It describes all fundamental particles in the universe as excitations in quantum fields.
- an excitations of the electromagnetic field is a photon.
- an excitaion of the electron field is a electron.
- an excitaion of the gluon field is a gluon.
- an excitation of the quark field would be a quark e.t.c.
- All these are waves, but when they are localized in a measurement, they appear to us as particles.
- These fields span all spacetime, in all directions – every type of matter and force has its own field – all the fundamental particles of the standard model would be represented by different fields.
- All these fields, when they are in their ground state, that is, their energy state, even when no excitations or particles are present, always have some vibrations – due to the Heisenberg uncertainity principal, particles are constantly being created and annihilated.
- These particles exist for a short period of time that they cannot be measured – they borrow energy from the vacuum when they are created and give it right back when they are annihilated.
- These flurry of energetic activity, for each field, collectively adds up to zero net real particles – real particles are created only when enough energy is transfered to these fields from other field to cause and excitation – these excitations are the real particles – since these are quantized fields, any exitation occurs in set quantities.
- An excitation of the electron field would have to occur in integer multiples of 0.511 mega electron volts which is the mass of one electron – so the field can have an energy of 1.022 MeV which would be the energy of two electrons or any other multiple of 0.511.
- The electron has this intrinsic mass of 0.511 Mev because of its interaction with the Higgs field – without this interaction, an electron would be massless – same with all other particles of the standard model with exeption of neutrinos.
- The Higgs Boson completes the standard model of particle physics, it explains how particles such as the W and Z bosons acquire mass to help us understand the fundamental structure of the universe – It’s a crucial piece of our best theory describing fundamental particles and forces.
