• Question: Who is Higgs boson?

    Asked by anon-201733 to Meirin on 5 Mar 2019. This question was also asked by anon-201681.
    • Photo: Meirin Oan Evans

      Meirin Oan Evans answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      The Higgs boson is a particle that was discovered at my laboratory in 2012. Discovering the Higgs boson was confirmation that we understand how fundamental particles (e.g. electrons) get mass. Without the Higgs, electrons would have no mass, so would fly out of atoms and there’d be no such thing as you or me!

Comments

  • Photo: Andy

    Andy commented on :

    The Higgs boson is not itself the thing that gives mass to elementary particles, but it’s like a hiccup in the thing that does: the Higgs field. It looks very much like we all live in an interacting soup of Higgsiness, that we’ve only recently noticed. It’s the interactions of particles with the soup that makes mass. The Higgs boson is like a bubble in the soup that we can create if we thwack particles together with so much energy that it burps.

    Actually, most of our mass doesn’t come about this way. It comes instead from an even stranger process called “chiral symmetry breaking” that explains why protons and neutrons are far more massive than the pretty light quarks that they are made from.