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- The Higgs boson that was first spotted was surprisingly lightweight. According to best estimates, it should have been a lot heavier. This opens up an interesting question: we spotted the first Higgs boson, but was that the only Higgs boson? Are there more floating around out there?
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- The scientists at the Large Hadron Collider, world's largest atom smasher, are digging into that question. And there's talk that as protons are smashed together inside the ring-shaped collider, heavier Higgs and even Higgs particles made up of various types could come out of hiding. The scientists speculate that beyond Higgs there are five more elusive particles that may lurk in the Universe.
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- If the heavy Higgs does indeed exist, then we need to reconfigure our understanding of the Standard Model of particle physics with the newfound realization that there's much more to the Higgs than meets the eye. And within those complex interactions, there might be a clue to everything from the mass of the ghostly neutrino particle and to the ultimate fate of the universe.
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- Without the Higgs boson, the whole Standard Model comes crashing down. In our best conception of the subatomic world using the Standard Model, what we think of as particles aren't actually very important. Instead, there are fields. These fields permeate and soak up all of space and time.
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- There is one field for each kind of particle. So, there's a field for electrons, a field for photons, and so on. What you think of as particles are really local little vibrations in their particular fields. And when particles interact it is really the vibrations in the fields that are doing a very complicated interaction.
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- The Higgs boson has a special kind of field. Like the other fields, it permeates all of space and time as it interacts with the other fields.
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- The Higgs' field has two very important jobs to do that can't be achieved by any other field. Its first job is to interact with the W and Z bosons (via their respective fields), the carriers of the weak nuclear force. By interacting with these other bosons, the Higgs is able to give them mass and make sure that they stay separated from the photons, the carriers of electromagnetic force. Without the Higgs boson running interference, all these carriers would be merged together and those two forces would also merge together.
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- The other job of the Higgs boson is to interact with other particles, like electrons; through these interactions, it also gives them mass. Otherwise we have no other way of explaining the masses of these particles.
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- This was all worked out in the 1960s through a series of complicated but assuredly elegant math, but there's just one tiny hitch to the theory: There's no real way to predict the exact mass of the Higgs boson.
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- In other words, when you go looking for the particle (which is the little local vibration of the much larger field) in a particle collider, you don't know exactly what and where you're going to find it.
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- In 2012, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider announced the discovery of the Higgs boson after finding a few of the particles that represent the Higgs' field had been produced when protons were smashed into one another at near light-speed.
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- These particles had a mass of 125 giga electron volts (GeV), or about the equivalent of 125 protons.
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- Physicists didn't really have a firm prediction for the mass of the Higgs boson, so it could be whatever it wanted to be; we happened to find the mass within the energy range of the LHC.
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- Except that there are some hesitant, half-predictions, about the mass of the Higgs boson based on the way it interacts with yet another particle, the top quark. Those calculations predict a number way higher than 125 GeV.
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- It could just be that those predictions are wrong, but then we have to circle back to the math and figure out where things are going haywire. Or, the mismatch between broad predictions and the reality of what was found inside the LHC could mean that there is much more to the Higgs boson story.
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- There very well could be a whole plethora of Higgs bosons out there that are too heavy for us to see with our current generation of particle colliders. The mass-energy calculations go back to Einstein's famous equation, E=mc^2 , which shows that energy is mass and mass is energy. The higher a particle's mass, the more energy it has and the more energy it takes to create the particle.
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- Some speculative theories that push our knowledge of physics beyond the Standard Model predict the existence of these heavy Higgs bosons. The exact nature of these additional Higgs characters depends on the theory ranging anywhere from simply one or two extra-heavy Higgs fields to even composite structures made of multiple different kinds of Higgs bosons stuck together.
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- Theorists are hard at work trying to find any possible way to test these theories, since most of them are simply inaccessible to current experiments. In a recent paper submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics, a team of physicists has advanced a proposal to search for the existence of more Higgs bosons, based on the peculiar way the particles might decay into lighter, more easily-recognizable particles, such as electrons, neutrinos and photons. However, these decays are extremely rare, so that while we can in principle find them with the LHC, it will take many more years of searching to collect enough data.
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- The Higgs boson, so what exactly is so special about this particle? It is the first and only elementary “scalar particle” we have observed.
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- At the subatomic scale, the universe is a complex choreography of elementary particles interacting with one another through the fundamental forces.
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- In the 1960s, theoretical physicists were working on a way of describing the fundamental laws of nature in terms of “quantum field theory“. In quantum field theory, both “matter” particles (fermions such as electrons, or the quarks inside protons) and the “force carriers” (bosons such as the photon, or the gluons that bind quarks) are manifestations of underlying, fundamental quantum fields. Today we call this elegant description the Standard Model of particle physics.
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- The Standard Model of particle physics can be represented in a single equation. The Standard Model is based on the notion of symmetries in nature, that the physical properties they describe remain unchanged under some transformation, such as a rotation in space.
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- Using this notion, physicists can provide a unified set of equations for both electromagnetism (electricity, magnetism, light) and the weak nuclear force (radioactivity). The force which is thus unified is called the electroweak force.
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- But these very symmetries present a glaring problem. The symmetries explained the electroweak force but in order to keep the symmetries valid, they forbid its force-carrying particles from having mass.
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- The photon, which carries electromagnetism, we knew was massless; the W and Z bosons, carriers of the weak force, could not be massless. Although the W and Z had not been directly observed at the time, physicists knew that if they were to have no mass, processes such as beta decay would have occurred at infinite rates, a physical impossibility, while other processes would have probabilities greater than one at high energies, another impossibility..
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- In 1964, two papers purported to have a solution: a new mechanism that would break the electroweak symmetry. The mechanism introduced a new quantum field that today we call the Higgs field, whose quantum manifestation is the Higgs boson.
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- Only particles that interact with the Higgs field acquire mass. It is exactly this mechanism that was originally conceived to explain the masses of the W and Z bosons. Scientists soon found they could extend this mechanism to account for the mass of all massive elementary particles.
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- The Higgs field is peculiar in two particular ways. Imagine an empty region of space, a perfect vacuum, without any matter present in it. Quantum field theory tells us that this hypothetical region is not really empty: particle–antiparticle pairs associated with different quantum fields pop into existence briefly before annihilating, transforming into energy.
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- However, the “expectation value” of these fields in a vacuum is zero, implying that on average we can expect there to be no particles within the perfect vacuum. The Higgs field on the other hand has a really high vacuum expectation value. This non-zero vacuum expectation value means that the Higgs field is everywhere. Its omnipresence is what allows the Higgs field to affect all known massive elementary particles in the entire universe.
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- When the universe had just come into being and was extremely hot, its energy density was higher than the energy associated with the vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field. As a result, the symmetries of the Standard Model could hold, allowing particles such as the W and Z to be massless.
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- As the universe started to cool down, the energy density dropped, until, fractions of a second after the Big Bang, it fell below that of the Higgs field. This resulted in the symmetries being broken and certain particles gaining mass.
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- The other property of the Higgs field is what makes it impossible to observe directly. Quantum fields, both observed and hypothesized, come in different varieties. Vector fields are like the wind: they have both magnitude and direction. Consequently, vector bosons have an intrinsic angular momentum that physicists call quantum spin.
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- Scalar fields have only magnitude and no direction, like temperature, and scalar bosons have no quantum spin. Before 2012 we had only ever observed vector fields at the quantum level, such as the electromagnetic field.
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- You can observe a field by observing a particle interacting with it, like electrons bending in a magnetic field. Or, you can observe it by producing the quantum particle associated with the field, such as a photon.
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- But the Higgs field, with its constant non-zero value, cannot be switched on or off like the electromagnetic field. Scientists had only one option to prove it exists: create and observe the Higgs boson in the Collider.
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- Particle collisions at sufficiently high energies are necessary to produce a Higgs boson, but for a long time physicists were hunting in the dark: they did not know what this energy range was.
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- They had searched for signs of the Higgs boson in particle-collision debris at the Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP), which was the Large Hadron Collider’s direct predecessor, and at Fermilab’s Tevatron in the US.
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- The Large Hadron Collider had the capacity to explore the entire predicted energy range where the Higgs boson could appear, and the two general-purpose particle detectors at the LHC – ATLAS and CMS – were meant to provide a definitive answer on its existence.
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- When two protons collide within the LHC, it is their constituent quarks and gluons that interact with one another. These high-energy interactions can, through well-predicted quantum effects, produce a Higgs boson, which would immediately transform, or “decay”, into lighter particles that ATLAS and CMS could observe.
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- The scientists therefore needed to build up enough evidence to suggest that particles that could have appeared from a Higgs collision productions and transformations were indeed the result of this process.
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- ATLAS and CMS observed the Higgs boson in transformations into two photons by collecting and analyzing lots of data over extended amount of time. When the LHC program started, popular belief was that we would only see a Higgs boson after several years of data collection.
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- Early signs of the Higgs boson were there: both detectors had seen bumps in their data that were starting to look distinct from any statistical fluctuations or noise. But the results lacked the necessary statistical certainty to claim discovery.
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- The collaborations had performed better than expected to discover the Higgs boson with just two years of data from the LHC. The discovery of the Higgs boson was a historic event, but we are still only at the beginning in our understanding of this new particle.
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------------------- Other Reviews available about the Higgs Boson:
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- 2395 - HIGGS BOSON - creator of all mass. The Higgs Boson could seal the fate of the Universe. It has been tagged in the media as the "God particle" when in 2012 it was discovered as a subatomic particle in the Large Hadron Collider. The Higgs boson is part of the Higgs Field that permeates all of space-time. It interacts with many particles, like electrons and quarks, providing those particles with mass.
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- 2197 - New in science in 2018 starts with microelectronics and works its way down to the Higgs boson.
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- 2045 - Higgs Boson, How Does It Work? To learn this we need to know a little Quantum Mechanics, a little Field Theory , the Uncertainty Principle, and some Particle Physics. First, Quantum Mechanics. Things are not smooth and continuous as they appear. Things are all in “ quanta’, small packets that are too small to see and even measure. Next, Quantum Mechanics does not stop with light. All things are quantized. Now, to Field Theory. Fields are simply a condition of points in space. Space is filled with Fields. - Particle Physics is our next pursuit. Mass and Energy are the same thing. Next theory and the math needed to create the Higgs Boson
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- 1944 - Discovering the Higgs Boson.
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- 1811 - Dark Energy and the Higgs Field. One field is trying to compress space back to a point and the other field is trying to blow it apart into oblivion. We are luckily in the middle somehow.
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- 1805 - 2015 new discoveries in astronomy and physics. Higgs, gravity waves, Dark Matter, and Dark Energy.
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- 1748 - The science of empty space. Radio waves are ripples that travel through your body. Ripples in the Higgs Field are call Higgs Bosons.
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- 1577 - All things at their smallest level are ” quanta”, small packets too small to see of even to measure.
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- 1498 - What is the Higgs Boson? Fortunately anti-matter does not occupy our natural world in any stable form.
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- 1495 - Larger energies correspond to smaller distances. The Higgs Boson is 126 GeV.
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- 1423 - Peter Higgs wrote 2 papers in 1964 predicting the Boson to cause particles to have mass.
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- May 5, 2020 2733
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