Context

Recently, Nobel laureate and noted Physicist Peter Higgs, known for predicting God’s Particle has passed away.

Peter Higgs- the father of God Particle

• God Particle: In the 1960s, Peter Higgs carried out research using Bose-Einstein Statistics. 
  • He wrote a paper about a very unstable particle that survives for a fraction of a second after its birth, and then it breaks apart producing other fundamental particles. He called this particle “Higgs Boson Particle” or “God Particle”.
• In 2012, Scientists at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research, located on the Swiss-French border in Switzerland) had found ‘Higgs Boson’ using the Large Hadron Collider, which is a 27 km long  particle accelerator built to study fundamental particles. 
• Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013 : He was awarded for his work, alongside Francois Englert of Belgium, who independently came with the same theory.
  • This Theory is related to how subatomic particles that are building blocks of matter get their mass.

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What is a Higgs Boson? 

• It is one of the 17 fundamental particles that constitutes the Standard Model of  Physics,which describes the physics of how the universe is constructed.

• The Higgs boson, a type of boson, is a force-carrying subatomic particle.
  • It carries the force that a particle experiences when traversing the Higgs field (a universal energy field),which is responsible for granting fundamental particles their mass.
• A particle’s mass is directly correlated with its interaction strength with the Higgs boson.
  • Therefore, Electrons possess a specific mass, while protons have more, and neutrons slightly surpass protons.
• A Higgs boson can also interact with another Higgs boson — this is how we know that its mass is greater than that of protons or neutrons.
• Features: 
  • The Higgs Boson has a mass of 125 billion electron volts, approximately 130 times more massive than protons.
  • It is also chargeless with zero spin,a quantum mechanical equivalent to angular momentum. 
  • It is only elementary particles with no spin.
• Significance of Higgs Boson Study : Researchers aspire to employ the Higgs Boson as a mechanism for learning deeper into the mysteries of the cosmos, including the enigma of dark matter.

Standard Model of Particle Physics

• The Standard Model of Particle Physics is scientists’ current best theory to describe the most basic building blocks of the universe. 
• It explains how particles called quarks (which make up protons and neutrons) and leptons (which include electrons) make up all known matter. 
• It also explains how force carrying particles, which belong to a broader group of bosons, influence the quarks and leptons. 
• The Standard Model explains three of the four fundamental forces that govern the universe: electromagnetism, the strong force, and the weak force. 
  • Electromagnetism is carried by photons and involves the interaction of electric fields and magnetic fields. 
  • The strong force, which is carried by gluons, binds together atomic nuclei to make them stable. 
  • The weak force, carried by W and Z bosons, causes nuclear reactions that have powered our Sun and other stars for billions of years. 
  • The fourth fundamental force is gravity, which is not adequately explained by the Standard Model.

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Recent Experiment of Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

• LHC generated a Higgs boson by colliding together billions of high-energy protons which resulted in a release of immense energy that forms various particles. 

• • Being heavy, the Higgs boson is unstable and breaks down into lighter particles. 
  • It can decay into a lepton pair and a photon in three different ways. 
• Recent evidence indicates Higgs Boson Decay: It says that a Higgs boson will decay to a Z boson and a photon 0.1% of the time. 
  • This means the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) needed to have created at least 1,000 Higgs bosons to have been able to spot one of them decaying to a Z boson and a photon.