![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Higgs Boson
Jul. 6th, 2012 05:30 amIt is wonderful news to hear that on Wednesday confirmation of the Higgs boson ,albeit, in its simplest form, has been detected by two teams working at CERN to a certainty of sigma 5, the scale which physicists use to define the confirmation of new particles.
Without the Higgs boson , the particle behind the Higgs filed which pervades the whole universe, there would be no mass and hence no particles heavier than the massless photon which travels at the speed of light. From that, there would have been no universe, without stars nor planets etc.
Within one trillionth of a second after the Big Bang the Higgs field kicked in to give the uniform radiation a soup like plasma with lumpy bits in it. These lumpy bits would begin to drag through the field adding mass to themselves, such as the quarks which are the building blocks of protons and neutrons, and to a lesser degree of drag, the electrons which orbit the atoms.
The Higgs boson is the signature of this filed that gives mass to particles. Some particles find the field more sticky which gives them the mass, whilst the photons are oblivious to the field.
Finding this particle vindicates the Standard Model of the cosmos, which envisages that the universe is made up of 12 building blocks, the fundamental particles and governed by four fundamental forces.
( Slightly more technical )
More details of the discovery are here -
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-18702455
Without the Higgs boson , the particle behind the Higgs filed which pervades the whole universe, there would be no mass and hence no particles heavier than the massless photon which travels at the speed of light. From that, there would have been no universe, without stars nor planets etc.
Within one trillionth of a second after the Big Bang the Higgs field kicked in to give the uniform radiation a soup like plasma with lumpy bits in it. These lumpy bits would begin to drag through the field adding mass to themselves, such as the quarks which are the building blocks of protons and neutrons, and to a lesser degree of drag, the electrons which orbit the atoms.
The Higgs boson is the signature of this filed that gives mass to particles. Some particles find the field more sticky which gives them the mass, whilst the photons are oblivious to the field.
Finding this particle vindicates the Standard Model of the cosmos, which envisages that the universe is made up of 12 building blocks, the fundamental particles and governed by four fundamental forces.
( Slightly more technical )
More details of the discovery are here -
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-18702455
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}