3.1.1 Summary and impact of the PRL papers.2.2.3 Vacuum energy and the cosmological constant.2.2.2 Nature of the universe, and its possible fates.2.1.4 Scalar fields and extension of the Standard Model.2.1.2 Symmetry breaking of the electroweak interaction.1.10 Overview of Higgs boson and field properties.1.2 Gauge invariant theories and symmetries.In the mainstream media, the Higgs boson is sometimes called the ' God particle' after the 1993 book The God Particle by Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman, although the nickname has been criticized by many physicists. Although Higgs's name has come to be associated with this theory, several researchers between about 19 independently developed different parts of it.

Physicists from two of the three teams, Peter Higgs and François Englert, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013 for their theoretical predictions. The new particle was subsequently confirmed to match the expected properties of a Higgs boson. This particle was called the Higgs boson, and could be used to test whether the Higgs field was the correct explanation.Īfter a 40 year search, a subatomic particle with the expected properties was discovered in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. (All fundamental particles that were known at the time should be massless at very high energies, but fully explaining how some particles gain mass at lower energies had been extremely difficult.) If these ideas were correct, a particle known as a scalar boson should also exist, with certain properties. Its ' Mexican hat-shaped' potential leads it to take a nonzero value everywhere (including otherwise empty space), which breaks the weak isospin symmetry of the electroweak interaction, and via the Higgs mechanism gives some particles mass.īoth the field and the boson are named after physicist Peter Higgs, who in 1964, along with five other scientists in three teams, proposed the Higgs mechanism, a way that some particles can acquire mass. The Higgs field is a scalar field, with two neutral and two electrically charged components that form a complex doublet of the weak isospin SU(2) symmetry. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately. In the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a massive scalar boson with zero spin, even (positive) parity, no electric charge, and no colour charge, that couples to (interacts with) mass. The Higgs boson, sometimes called the Higgs particle, is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics produced by the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, one of the fields in particle physics theory. Two leptons and a photon (Dalitz decay via virtual photon) (tentatively observed at sigma 3.2 (1 in 1000) significance).

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