HIGGS BOSON

HIGGS BOSON

INTRODUCTION

Matters at subatomic level consists of small particles with vast empty spaces in between. These small particles are electrons, protons, neutrons, pi-mesons, neutrino and so on.

 

Subatomic particles are those particles which are much smaller than atoms. There are two kinds of Subatomic particles first is Elementary particles, which according to present theories are not made of other particles and Composite particles. Nuclear and Particle physics comprises these particles and do study how they interact. Higgs boson is an elementary particle of the standard model. The term boson was given by Paul Dirac in honour of Satyendra Nath Bose (an Indian physicist who provided the theory of the Bose–Einstein condensate and laid the foundation for Bose–Einstein statistics). Bosons are energy particles; they are responsible for interatomic forces. Higgs particle is named after the theorist Peter Higgs who along with several other scientists proposed its existence in 1964.

                  

THE STANDARD MODEL

 

Matter and energy can be best understood in terms of kinematics and interaction of elementary particles. The standard model consists of several classes of elementary particles (fermions, gauge bosons and the higgs boson). All particles can be sum up as follows:

⮚    The Standard Model includes twelve elementary particles of spin   ¹⁄₂ known as fermions. Fermions are matter particles. Each fermion has its corresponding antiparticle.  There are six quarks (up, down, charm, strange, top, bottom) and six leptons (electron, electron neutrino, muon, muon neutrino, tau, tau neutrino).

⮚    In standard model, Gauge bosons are defined as force carriers that mediate the strong, weak, and electromagnetic fundamental interactions. The value of the spin is 1, making them bosons.

⮚    The Higgs boson was the last particle of the standard model to be experimentally confirmed. The standard model doesn’t predict its mass directly. On 4^thJuly2012, the ATLAS and CMS experiment at CERN announced the discovery of a boson at a mass approximately 125 GeV which is Higgs Boson.

WHAT IS HIGGS BOSON?

Peter Higgs predicted in 1964 that due to higgs mechanism things in the universe – stars, planets even people have mass. During its discovery in mainstream of media it is often referred to as the ‘GOD PARTICLE’.

Peter Higgs proposed energy field that permeated the entire universe, this energy field is now called higgs field. The presence of the field, can be confirmed by experiments, explains why some fundamental particles have mass. The Higgs field consists of countless Higgs Bosons.

Higgs Mechanism: - Mechanism by which certain particles interact with higgs field and have property of mass.

DISCOVERY OF THE HIGGS BOSONS

The LHC is a discovery machine is currently world’s largest hadron collider, where protons are accelerated in 27km circumference synchrotron and collide at very high energy. The LHC was built by CERN, in tunnel located approx. 100m underground. Collisions are analysed with usage of detectors.

CONCLUSION

Evidence of the higgs bosons, higgs field and its properties has been extremely significant for many reasons. The Higgs boson's importance is largely that it is able to be examined using existing knowledge and experimental technology.

AUTHOR:

Ms. Jyoti Narwal 

(Assistant Professor, Civil Engineering Department)