What is the Higgs boson?
The Higgs boson is a type of elementary particle that is believed to have a fundamental role in the mechanism by which the mass of elementary particles originates. Without mass, the Universe would be a very different place. If the electron had no mass there would be no atoms, which would not exist as we know it, so there would be no chemistry, no biology, and we would not exist. To explain why some particles have mass and others do not, several physicists, among them the British Peter Higgs, postulated in the 60s of the 20th century a mechanism known as the "Higgs field". Just as the photon is the fundamental component of light, the Higgs field requires the existence of a particle that composes it, which physicists call the "Higgs boson". This is the last piece missing to complete the Standard Model of Particle Physics, which describes everything we know about the elementary particles that make up everything we see and how they interact with each other.
Why is the Higgs boson so important?
Because it is the only particle predicted by the Standard Model of Particle Physics that has not yet been discovered. The standard model perfectly describes the elementary particles and their interactions, but an important part remains to be confirmed, precisely the one that responds to the origin of the mass. Without mass, the Universe would be a very different place. If the electron had no mass there would be no atoms, which would not exist as we know it, so there would be no chemistry, no biology, and we would not exist. To explain this, several physicists, including the British Peter Higgs, postulated in the 60s of the twentieth century a mechanism known as the Higgs field. Just as the photon is the fundamental component of the electromagnetic field and light, the Higgs field requires the existence of a particle that composes it, which physicists call the Higgs boson.
History of a search
The search for the Higgs boson began decades ago in particle accelerators such as LEP from CERN or Tevatron from FERMILAB (United States), both already closed. Because the theory does not establish the mass of the Higgs boson, but a wide range of possible values, very powerful accelerators are required to explore this new territory of Physics. The LHC is the culmination of an "energy escalation" aimed at discovering the Higgs boson in the particle accelerators, which has allowed until now to exclude that it has a mass smaller than the equivalent to approximately 115 times that of the proton.
What is a boson?
Subatomic particles are divided into two types: fermions and bosons. Fermions are particles that makeup matter, and bosons carry forces or interactions. The components of the atom (electrons, protons, and neutrons) are fermions, while the photons, the gluons and the W and Z bosons, responsible respectively for electromagnetic nuclear forces, strong and weak nuclear, are bosons.
How can the Higgs boson be detected?
The Higgs boson can not be detected directly, because once it is produced it disintegrates almost instantaneously giving rise to other more familiar elementary particles. What you can see are your "fingerprints", those other particles that can be detected in the LHC. Within the accelerator ring, the protons collide with each other at a speed close to that of light. When collisions occur at strategic points where large detectors are located, the energy of the movement is released and is available to generate other particles. The greater the energy of the particles that collide, the more mass that will result, according to the famous Einstein E2 equation.
The Higgs boson points the way to the New Physics
New results obtained at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) have shown how the Higgs boson, the heaviest known elementary particle, interacts not only with massive particles but also with particles devoid of mass. It was observed due to the disintegration of the Higgs boson in two photons, which are massless particles. According to quantum mechanics, the Higgs boson can fluctuate for a brief moment in a top quark and a top antiquark, which cancel each other rapidly forming a pair of photons. The top quark is an elementary particle that belongs to the third generation of quarks, the only elementary particles that interact with the four fundamental forces: nuclear, electromagnetic, weak and gravity. Quarks not only form nuclear matter but also sometimes subatomic particles such as protons and neutrons. Quarks exist with their corresponding antiparticles. The top quark is the most massive of the quarks discovered to date. It is a very unstable particle, so it does not have time to merge with other quarks and form new particles known as hadrons. Its antiparticle is the top antiquark. The Higgs boson or Higgs particle is an elementary particle proposed in the standard model of particle physics. It has no spin, electric charge or color, is very unstable and disintegrates quickly: its half-life is of the order of one billionth of a second (zeptosecond).
