However, physicists from Fermilab and CERN have announced research results that did just that. There are many other processes that produce pairs of b quarks and events that look nearly the same as a Higgs decay process, making it very difficult to distinguish Higgs decays from this background. The heaviest particles with mass less than half a Higgs (125 GeV/c 2) are bquarks most Higgs bosons decay into a pair of b’s. Because the Higgs couples to mass, it wants to decay into a pair of the heaviest particles possible. Two days later, physicists at CERN announced the discovery of the Higgs-like boson, which decays into pairs of bosons ( photons, W’s, or Z’s). In July 2012, physicists at Fermilab announced evidence for a new particle that decays into b-quark pairs. Without mass, matter wouldn’t exist, and without matter, we wouldn’t exist. The stronger the coupling to the Higgs field, the more massive the particles are. Additionally, because all other particles need to propagate through this Higgs field, it slows them down (similar to a person walking through water) and gives the particles mass. When this happened at the beginning of the universe, the process released enough energy to create matter and to help power the big bang. In technical terms, the Higgs has a non-zero vacuum-expectation-value (VEV).įigure 2: The Higgs potential, which resembles a Mexican hatĪfter spontaneous symmetry breaking (in which the system “chooses” a direction for the field), 3 the Higgs field has a non-zero VEV, which means that there is a Higgs field everywhere in the universe. (For this potential, picture sitting on a bicycle at the top of a hill any direction you roll, you will gain kinetic energy.) So, the Higgs boson’s lowest energy state is not at zero but is at some finite value of the Higgs field. The key to the Higgs mechanism is that the Higgs potential is shaped like what physicists refer to as a Mexican hat potential, with a peak at the origin rather than a valley (see figure 2). Likewise, energy is required to make a non-zero number of particles. In order to get out of the pool you would need to expend energy to climb, no matter the direction. Another way of understanding this potential is to imagine standing at the bottom of an empty swimming pool. Most particles have a potential energy surface that looks like a bowl or valley with the lowest point at the origin, where the field of particles is zero (see figure 1). At the same time, the Higgs mechanism gave some particles mass, allowing them to come to rest. However, through a process called the Higgs mechanism, enough energy was released to help power the big bang and create matter. Moreover, the universe was most likely completely empty since no energy existed to create any particles. Research indicates that in the beginning of the universe, all particles were massless, so everything travelled at the speed of light. Without the Higgs boson, the universe as we know it would not exist. (Hence one reason why some have nicknamed the Higgs “the God Particle.”) Exploring and understanding the Higgs boson could give us a glimpse into how God went about accomplishing this awesome work. The Bible describes God as creating the cosmos-all matter, space, time, and energy-from nothing, a scenario (known as creation ex nihilo) supported by big bang cosmology. Is it really the Higgs or is it some other particle? Preliminary results from these studies were recently released. Thus, since 2012, physicists have been working hard to determine the true identity of this particle. 1 Yes, these properties were consistent with those expected of the Higgs boson-but there are potentially other particles that could exhibit these characteristics, too. In 2012, when a newfound “Higgs-like” particle made international headlines, the only properties physicists had yet measured were the particle’s mass and the rate at which it was seen to decay into a number of final states (primarily into two photons). The Higgs also gives mass to matter, a necessary condition for life to exist. This important particle could help explain the “how” of creation ex nihilo, or how God created everything out of nothing. Physicists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have reported new results showing that the “Higgs-like” boson discovered in 2012 is indeed consistent with expectations for a standard model Higgs boson (sometimes called the “God Particle”).
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