Rapid Fire
God Particle or Higgs Boson
- 13 Apr 2024
- 2 min read
The recent passing of Nobel laureate physicist Peter Higgs has brought attention back to the elusive particle he theorised in the 1960s, known as the 'God particle' or Higgs boson.
- The Higgs boson, an elementary particle akin to electrons or quarks, plays a crucial role in imparting mass to other fundamental particles.
- Peter Higgs, first proposed the existence of the Higgs field and the associated Higgs boson in the 1960s.
- The Higgs boson is the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, which is believed to permeate the entire universe and interact with other particles, giving them mass.
- The discovery of the Higgs boson completed what is known as the Standard Model of Particle Physics, which describes all the fundamental particles (electrons and protons, and the forces, like electromagnetism, gravitation or nuclear forces, that build up the material part of the world).
- According to the Standard Model of Particle Physics, particles gain their mass by interacting with the Higgs field, which is present throughout the universe.
- The stronger a particle interacts with the Higgs field, the more it "feels" the field and the more massive it becomes.
- The Higgs boson was experimentally discovered in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
Read more: Nobel Prize in Physics 2023
