This particle is consistent with the Higgs boson but it will take further work to determine whether or not it is the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model. On 4 July 2012, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider announced they had each observed a new particle in the mass region around 125 GeV. The lower event in the ATLAS experiment shows a decay into four muons (red tracks) (Image: CMS/ATLAS/CERN)Ī problem for many years has been that no experiment has observed the Higgs boson to confirm the theory. The top event in the CMS experiment shows a decay into two photons (dashed yellow lines and green towers). The Higgs boson is the visible manifestation of the Higgs field, rather like a wave at the surface of the sea.Īn elusive particle Candidate Higgs boson events from collisions between protons in the LHC. Like all fundamental fields, the Higgs field has an associated particle – the Higgs boson. Particles like the photon that do not interact with it are left with no mass at all. The more a particle interacts with this field, the heavier it is. Just after the big bang, the Higgs field was zero, but as the universe cooled and the temperature fell below a critical value, the field grew spontaneously so that any particle interacting with it acquired a mass. (Image: Maximilien Brice/Laurent Egli/CERN) At CERN on 4 July 2012, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations present evidence in the LHC data for a particle consistent with a Higgs boson, the particle linked to the mechanism proposed in the 1960s to give mass to the W, Z and other particles.
What we now call the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism gives a mass to the W and Z when they interact with an invisible field, now called the “Higgs field”, which pervades the universe. Fortunately, theorists Robert Brout, François Englert and Peter Higgs made a proposal that was to solve this problem. While this is true for the photon, we know that the W and Z have mass, nearly 100 times that of a proton.
All of these particles emerge without a mass. The basic equations of the unified theory correctly describe the electroweak force and its associated force-carrying particles, namely the photon, and the W and Z bosons, except for a major glitch.
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