Higgs Boson Particle Essay

1095 Words3 Pages

The year 2012 was not only memorable to physicists for its breakthroughs, which include the galaxy motion cluster, neutrino-based communication or the method to see through opaque materials. But it is memorable because 2012 was the year that the physicists working in the Large Hadron Collider announced the detection of the Higgs boson particle.
The Higgs Boson particle was hypothesized by a British physicist named Peter Higgs more than 50 years ago because of the undetermined origin of mass to known particles made the assignment of mass extremely difficult and made mathematical equations inconsistent (Exploratorium, 2012). The Higgs Boson particle was supposed to complete the standard model of particle physics and break the electroweak symmetry during the initial moments of the Big Bang (Cho, 2012). The Higgs boson particle was one of the main research experiments of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator with a circumference of 27 kilometers (CERN, 2008). However, after hitting mainstream, the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle reveals its significance not only as the particle nicknamed as the god particle but also as the particle that was named as the breakthrough of 2012 through its significance in the field of Physics. This paper aims to describe the significance of the Higgs Boson particle to the standard model, the Higgs field, and the electroweak symmetry breaking.
The understanding that matter was composed of atoms was changed with the discovery of smaller particles than the atoms, which are protons, neutrons, and electrons. But during the 1960’s, the multitude of particles being discovered was making the understanding that matter is composed of protons, neutrons, and electrons, insufficient. Murray Ge...

... middle of paper ...

... ultimately the universe's high temperature. The significance of the Higgs field to the particles is its mass. Mass actually has two parts. The first part is the rest mass, which is the mass of the particle obtained from its interaction with the Higgs field. The other part is the potential energy with its interaction with other fields like gravitational field and electromagnetic field, which equals to an increment in its mass by the theory of relativity (Golli, 2012 ). Theorist propose the idea that the rest mass being generated by the Higgs field varies for various particles relation to the proportion of the amount of Higgs Boson particles it couples with during its interaction with the Higgs field. Therefore, the masses of the particles show the amount of Higgs it coupled with. The heavier a particle is, denotes that the more it interacted with a Higgs boson.

More about Higgs Boson Particle Essay

Open Document