What's the Matter with the Higgs Boson?

[Joanne98]

The search is on for the Higgs boson, and it seems likely that soon we'll find this mysterious particle that creates matter in the universe. But what if we don't? In this week's "Ask a Physicist," we'll find out.

Image by Michael Taylor/Shutterstock

The Higgs boson has the unique distinction of being the only particle in our standard model of particle physics that we haven't yet discovered. We may be on the verge of detecting it in the next few years, and yet, for some reason, almost nobody has asked anything about it, even though I've been chomping at the bit to write about it.

Luckily, a former student of mine, Bailey McCreery, decided that he just needed to know:

If the Higgs boson is found to exist, how would it change the way we understand mass? If it's not found, where will that leave us?

This is a big, fairly complicated question. To answer it, I'm going to have to explain what the Higgs actually does, and why we expect to find it. If you want, you can content yourself with saying, "The Higgs particle gives other particles mass," and skip to the last section, and I won't think any the worse of you. Others might, but I won't.

I also warn you that I'm going to say almost nothing about history. All I want to mention is that a bunch of people independently came up with similar ideas for what we now call the Higgs Boson in the 1960's, including Peter Higgs. We're not going to correct the historical injustice of scientific naming here, but if you want to read all about it, the good folks at Wikipedia have got your back. I'm also not going to get into the details of how the big accelerators work or how we actually figure out if we've detected a particle, though I'd be happy to answer that sort of question in a future column.

Most importantly, though, I need to say a thing or two about...

Particles, Fields, and Waves

If you know one thing about quantum mechanics, it's that particles have both wave and particle properties. But today we'll talk about high energy interactions, and that means talking about "fields." You might suppose that fields and waves are the same; they are not. You see, with a quantum-mechanical wave, the assumption is that there is just a single particle, and we're describing the probability of finding it in one place or another. With fields, particles pop into and out of existence constantly.

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