The discovery of the God Particle

[객원 에디터 8기/ 박준우 기자] The Higgs boson, dubbed “The God Particle,” is a fundamental particle that was discovered in 2012 and is the fundamental particle associated with the Higgs field.

Quantum field theory states that all particles that exist are excitations in quantum fields. Quantum fields can be thought of as the plane in which every fundamental particle, like an electron, exists. These quantum fields interact with each other, and these interactions provide the basis for all matter as we know it. 

There exists a quantum field for each one of the twelve matter particles and these excitations make up everything in the known universe, as well as a field for each one of the four fundamental forces. In total, the Standard Model (the current best theory to describe how particles interact to make up all known matter) lists seventeen fields, one for each of the particles listed in the model, one of them being the Higgs field.

The Higgs field is a field that gives other particles mass. It was first theorised by British physicist Peter Higgs as a field that could stiffen other fields, only allowing for their ripples to vibrate in place with a resonant frequency. 

This was confirmed in 2012 when researchers at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland measured particles from the decay of a Higgs boson. 

A boson can be defined as a “force carrier” that exchanges a force when two particles interact. For example, when two electrons repel, they emit a photon between them that allows them to interact. The Higgs boson has the same function, but instead of allowing two particles to interact, it allows the Higgs field to interact with a particle, giving it mass.

The reason the Higgs boson was not found earlier is due to its mass. The Higgs boson is much heavier than other subatomic particles. In fact, it is more than 200,000 times heavier than an electron, causing it to decay much faster than other particles. 

The name “The God particle” originates from Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman, who dubbed it “The Goddamn Particle” due to how difficult it was to detect. However, his publishers changed the name to “The God Particle”, a name that quickly gained popularity in the scientific community. 

While the origins of its name are somewhat anticlimactic, the reason that it has stuck is because the Higgs boson is the most important particle to all of quantum field theory. It is the particle that gives mass to all other particles, and without it, the world as we know it would not exist.

Sources: Symmetry, Quanta Magazine, US Department of Energy, Space, CERN