Submitted by:
Mina, Madelyn Ann C.
IV- St. Cecilia
Submitted to:
Mr. Noel A. Hermano
Submitted by:
Mina, Madelyn Ann C.
IV- St. Cecilia
Submitted to:
Mr. Noel A. Hermano
Higgs Boson
Higgs Boson

What is Higgs Boson?

What is Higgs Boson?

Higgs Boson, the “God Particle” as coined by Leon Lederman back in 1993, is the particle that made up the Higgs Field. The Higgs Field is the energy field that permeated the entire universe, according to Dr. Peter Higgs. For example, our entire universe is covered with snowfield and we know that what makes up a snowfield is a snowflake. The same way it goes with the Higgs field; it is made up of Higgs Boson (Ellis, 2013). The Higgs Boson or the Higgs Particle is the very first elementary particle that does not spin at all; it has no electric charge, nor color charge. It was officially announced to the public last year (2012), 4th of the month of July at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland. Their discovery was confirmed as the Higgs boson on March 14 this year, bringing to an end to a 50-year search. The discovery of the Higgs Boson is very important because it is said to be the missing link in our understanding of the universe, known as the Standard Model. It has also led to Professor Higgs becoming the only person ever to have a fundamental particle named after him. (Wilson, 2013).It was regarded as the “God Particle” before but many physicists did not like the way it was called.
Results to
Results to
More Interaction to the Higgs Field More mass
More Interaction to the Higgs Field More mass Every time a particle interacts more with the Higgs Field, we can predict that it has more mass than any other particle that has less interaction to the Higgs Field. Therefore,

But why? Why does it result to more mass when it t interacts more to the Higgs Field? Because Higgs Boson is a particle that gives mass to other particles. Higgs Boson is said to have a mass that ranges from 125 GeV/c2 to 127 GeV/c2 (GeV means Giga-Electron-Volt = One thousand million electron volts).
Who is the Person behind Higgs Boson?
Who is the Person behind Higgs Boson?

The discovery of the Higgs Boson last 2012 had a great impact in the world of science particularly in the field of Physics. The apparent discovery of the subatomic particle has been hailed as a major breakthrough by physicists. Physicist were greatly overwhelmed about this new particle and they had been studying about the properties of this Higgs Boson through the most expensive, most technologically advanced and the biggest facility ever built by humankind – the Large Hadron Collider. While scientist are greatly disturbed by this discovery, it’s time to unfold and introduce the person behind this “Higgs Boson.”
As mentioned earlier, it was named after Dr. Peter Higgs and this statement gives as an idea that it was perhaps Dr. Peter Higgs’ discovery. Yes, it was his discovery; the genius man behind the Higgs Boson. François Englert of the Free University of Brussels, Belgium and his late colleague Robert Brout were the first to describe how this field [Higgs Field] might operate, but it was Peter Higgs who first predicted the particle that bears his name. (Aron, 2013).
Even before, scientists were greatly into this ‘particle’ but they could not just simply point it out. In 1964, Robert Brout and François Englert, Peter Higgs, and Gerald Guralnik, C. Richard Hagen, and Tom Kibble wrote scientific papers which proposed related but different approaches to explain how mass could arise in local gauge theories. They are credited with the theory of the Higgs mechanism and the prediction of the Higgs field and Higgs boson. All of the six physicists were awarded the 2010 J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics for this work, and in 2013 Englert and Higgs received the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Physicist Involved in the Search for the Higgs Boson
Physicist Involved in the Search for the Higgs Boson

Dr. Peter Ware Higgs
Dr. Peter Ware Higgs

Dr. Peter Higgs was born on the 29th of May in 1929. He is a British theoretical Physicist, Nobel Prize laureate and a professor at the University of Edinburgh - the sixth-oldest university in the English-speaking world. The original basis of Higgs' work came from the Japanese-born theorist and Nobel Prize laureate Yoichiro Nambu from the University of Chicago. Professor Nambu had proposed a theory known as spontaneous symmetry breaking based on what was known to happen in superconductivity in condensed matter; however, the theory predicted massless particles (the Goldstone's theorem), a clearly incorrect prediction. At Edinburgh Higgs first became interested in mass, developing the idea that particles – massless when the universe began – acquired mass a fraction of a second later as a result of interacting with a theoretical field (which became known as the Higgs field). Higgs postulated that this field permeates space, giving mass to all elementary subatomic particles that interact with it. The Higgs mechanism postulates the existence of the Higgs field which confers mass on quarks and leptons. However this causes only a tiny portion of the masses of other subatomic particles, such as protons and neutrons. In these, gluons that bind quarks together confer most of the particle mass. On 4 July 2012, CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) announced the ATLAS and CMS experiments had seen strong indications for the presence of a new particle, which could be the Higgs boson. Speaking at the seminar in Geneva, Higgs commented "It's really an incredible thing that it's happened in my lifetime."

François, Baron Englert
François, Baron Englert

François, Baron Englert was born on 6th of November in 1932. He is a Holocaust survivor and was born in a Belgian Jewish Family. He is a Belgian theoretical physicist and he is also a Nobel Prize laureate just like Peter Higgs. He is Professor emeritus at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) where he is member of the Service de Physique Théorique. He is also a Sackler Professor by Special Appointment in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Tel Aviv University and a member of the Institute for Quantum Studies at Chapman University in California.
Brout and Englert, Higgs, and Gerald Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, and Tom Kibble introduced as agent of the vacuum structure a scalar field (most often called the Higgs field) which many physicists view as the agent responsible for all masses in the universe. Brout and Englert also showed that the mechanism may remain valid if the scalar field is replaced by a more structured agent such as a fermion condensate. Their approach led them to conjecture that the theory is renormalizable. The eventual proof of renormalizability, a major achievement of twentieth century physics, is due to Gerardus 't Hooft and Martinus Veltman who were awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize for this work. The Brout–Englert–Higgs–Guralnik–Hagen–Kibble mechanism is the building stone of the electroweak theory of elementary particles and laid the foundation of a unified view of the basic laws of nature.

Robert Brout
Robert Brout

Robert Brout is born on the 14th of June in 1928. He died at the age of 82 last 2011 in the 3rd of May. Brout is an American-Belgian theoretical physicist of jewish origin and a Professor of Physics at Université Libre de Bruxelles where he had created, together with François Englert, the Service de Physique Théorique.
In 1964, Brout, in collaboration with Englert, discovered how mass can be generated for gauge particles in the presence of a local abelian and non-abelian gauge symmetry. This was demonstrated by them, both classically and quantum mechanically, successfully avoiding theorems initiated by J. Goldstone while indicating that the theory would be renormalizable. Similar ideas have been developed in condensed matter physics.Peter Higgs and Gerald Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, and Tom Kibble came to the same conclusion as Brout and Englert.
While each of these famous papers took similar approaches, the contributions and differences between the 1964 PRL symmetry breaking papers is noteworthy. This work showed that the particles that carry the weak force acquire their mass through interactions with an all-pervasive field that is now known as the Higgs field, and that the interactions occur via particles that are widely known as Higgs bosons. As yet, these Higgs bosons had not been observed experimentally; however, most physicists believed that they exist.

Gerald Guralnik
Gerald Guralnik

Gerald Guralnik was born on 17th of September in 1936. He is the Chancellor’s Professor of Physics at Brown and he was one of the six international physicists who originated the Higgs theory in 1964.
Professor Guralnik received his PH.D in Physics from Harvard University. He has carried out research at many institutions in Europe and the United States. His primary interest is in elementary particle theory. He went to Imperial College London as a postdoctoral fellow supported by the National Science Foundation and then became a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Rochester. In the fall of 1967 went to Brown University and frequently visited Imperial College and Los Alamos National Laboratory where he was a staff member from 1985 to 1987. While at Los Alamos, he did extensive work on the development and application of computational methods for Lattice QCD. He is most famous for his co-discovery of the Higgs mechanism and Higgs boson with C. R. Hagen and Tom Kibble..

Carl Richard Hagen
Carl Richard Hagen

Carl Richard Hagen was born on the 2nd of February in 1937. He is a professor of particle physics at the University of Rochester. He is most noted for his contributions to the Standard Model and Symmetry breaking as well as the co-discovery of the Higgs mechanism and Higgs boson. Professor Hagen's research interests are in the field of Theoretical High Energy Physics, primarily in the area of quantum field theory. This includes the formulation and quantization of higher spin field theories within the context of Galilean relativity as well as that of Special relativity.
Hagen received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At MIT, his doctoral thesis topic was in quantum electrodynamics. He has been a professor of physics at the University of Rochester since 1963. Professor Hagen won the Award for Excellence in Teaching, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester twice (in 1996 and 1999). Hagen is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and was named Outstanding Referee by APS in 2008. Valparaiso University awarded Hagen the degree Honorary Doctor of Science in 2012 for his significant contributions to particle physics and the theory of mass generation.

Thomas Walter Bannerman Kibble
Thomas Walter Bannerman Kibble

Thomas W. B. Kibble was born on the 23rd of December in 1932. He is a British theoretical physicist and senior research investigator at The Blackett Laboratory, at Imperial College London, UK. Kibble is an avid cyclist. He was born in Madras, India and is the grandson of author Helen Bannerman and William Bannerman who was an officer in the Indian Medical Service.
He has worked on mechanisms of symmetry breaking, phase transitions and the topological defects that can be formed. Kibble is noted for his co-discovery of the Higgs mechanism and Higgs boson with Gerald Guralnik and C. R. Hagen. For this discovery Prof. Kibble was awarded The American Physical Society's 2010 J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics. Prof. Kibble is also a Fellow of the Royal Society, of the Institute of Physics, and of Imperial College London, a member of the American Physical Society, the European Physical Society and the Academia Europaea, and a CBE. He has been awarded the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society and the Rutherford and Guthrie Medals of the Institute of Physics.

So, how did they come to confirm it?

So, how did they come to confirm it?

This idea of the existence of the Higgs boson were rejected several times. They consider it as a ‘junk’ but after many revisions of Dr. Peter Higgs’ proposal to this ‘another particle,’ the Physical Review Letters finally published his work and the works of the other five scientists who patiently worked on this research.
In order to confirm the existence of the Higgs Boson, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) built the Large Hadron Collider or the LHC from 1998 to 2008. The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. It is one hundred meters (or about 328 feet) underground, beneath the border between France and Switzerland. It’s the world's largest machine and it will examine the universe's tiniest particles. The LHC consists of a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles along the way. They had built this despite the fact that it will cost them a lot because they aim of allowing physicists to test the predictions of different theories of particle physics and high-energy physics, and particularly prove or disprove the existence of the theorized Higgs particle. Physicists hope that the LHC will help answer some of the fundamental open questions in physics, concerning the basic laws governing the interactions and forces among the elementary objects, and many more.
How Does the LHC Works?
How Does the LHC Works?

The particles the LHC will accelerate and collide are protons or lead nuclei, both have positive charges and this means that they can be steered by use of appropriate magnetic fields.
Various types of superconducting magnets (9,300 in total) are used to steer and focus beams of particles as they race around the 27km loop of the LHC collider. The LHC carries two beams, travelling in opposite directions, in two, adjacent beam pipes. At the collision points the beams briefly share the same pipe as the magnets direct them to collide head-on. The beam pipes are enclosed in a sheath of superconducting magnets and all of this is bathed in supercold liquid helium (1.8oK).
The magnets, which make up the bulk of the collider, are only one part of the story. The other task of the collider is to accelerate the particles as they travel around it. This is done at 4 locations where the particles pass through superconducting radio frequency (RF) cavities. Just like pushing a child’s swing, these RF cavities give the particles a push each time they pass, steadily increasing the energy of the particles prior to collision.
The LHC is the last in a ‘ladder’ of accelerators that are used in sequence to accelerate low energy particles up to the LHC’s maximum energy.
The LHC has detectors as well. the ALICE observes the Primordial Cosmic Plasma, the ATLAS and the CMS seeks for the Higgs Boson and the Dark Matter, and the LHCb seeks the Matter-antimatter difference.

When did the search started?
When did the search started?

1964
Peter Higgs is the first to explicitly predict the particle that would eventually acquire his name in October, but other physicists can also lay claim to the idea of a mass-generating boson. In August, Robert Brout and François Englert independently detail how the mass-generation mechanism could work. Another group – Dick Hagen, Gerald Guralnik and Tom Kibble – also produce similar ideas independently, publishing shortly after Higgs in November.
Identifying exactly who came up with the Higgs could be problematic for the Nobel committee, as the prize can only be shared between a maximum of three people.
1995
Even without the discovery of the Higgs boson we still have evidence for the Higgs mechanism, as it allowed the Standard Model to make a number of successful predictions, including the discovery of the heaviest known particle, the top quark. In 1995, CERN's Chicago rival, Fermilab, finds the top quark using its Tevatron particle accelerator at around 176 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) – just as predicted.
2001
Before the Large Hadron Collider, CERN had the Large Electron-Positron (LEP) Collider, which spent five years looking for a Higgs with a mass of around 80 GeV before closing in 2000. Conclusive analysis the following year rules out a Higgs with a mass below 115 GeV.
2004
During a gap between the closure of the LEP and the switch-on of the LHC, Chicago was the most likely place to find the Higgs. Data from the Tevatron places the Higgs above 117 GeV, just above LEP's reach, with an upper limit of 251 GeV.
2007
The LHC is capable of colliding particles at higher energies than any previous accelerator, so experiments pointing to a lighter Higgs increased the Tevatron's chances of discovery. With pressure from CERN mounting, Fermilab reduces the upper limit to 153 GeV.
2008
One billion people watch as proton beams circulate the Large Hadron Collider for the first time, amid unfounded fears that it could produce a world-destroying black hole. The Higgs hunt is back on at CERN, but only briefly, as a gas leak shuts the accelerator down until the following year.
2009
With the LHC out of action until November, Tevatron researchers say – somewhat hopefully – that they have a 50 per cent chance of finding the Higgs by end of 2010.
2010
Physics blogs buzz with rumours of a Higgs signal at the Tevatron that ultimately prove false.
2011
April sees another round of rumours flourish after an unreviewed LHC study is leaked online, while in September the Tevatron shuts down, having failed to find the Higgs. As the year draws to a close, the LHC's ATLAS and CMS experiments both show hints of the Higgs at around 125 GeV, the first signal at nearly the same mass.
2012
In February, the LHC boosts collision energy from 7 to 8 teraelectronvolts (TeV), improving its Higgs sensitivity by 30 to 40 per cent.
4 July
The existence of the Higgs Boson was officially announced to the public.
14 March 2013
The existence of the Higgs Boson was confirmed.

This timeline is from: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22008-a-brief-history-of-a-boson-timeline-of-higgs.html#.Un8nNuI-dkM but this has few revisions.

Is there any Physics in it?
Is there any Physics in it?

We have been mentioning about this newly discovered ‘particle.’ While we strive to know more about this Higgs Boson, we are engaging in the branch of Physics known as Particle Physics.
Particle Physics is the branch of Physics that studies the nature of particles that are the constituents of what is usually referred to as matter and radiation. Theoretical particle physics attempts to develop the models, theoretical framework, and mathematical tools to understand current experiments and make predictions for future experiments. The LHC also uses magnets and energies to make the particles move like of that speed of light in order to collide the particles.

Is there any news about this Higgs Boson?
Is there any news about this Higgs Boson?

Finding the Higgs Leads to More Puzzles
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: November 4, 2011
Near the end of “The Tempest,” in what has been taken as Shakespeare’s farewell speech, the sorcerer Prospero breaks his staff and declares, “Our revels now are ended.” And he goes on: “These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air: and ...leave not a rack behind.”
The latest word from physics is that something like that ending may be in store for the universe. In this case, the role of Prospero is played by the Higgs field, an invisible ocean of energy that permeates space, confers mass on elementary particles and gives elementary forces their distinct features and strengths.
The field, theoretical for 50 years, took on real life last year when physicists at CERN in Europe discovered the Higgs boson, a sort of droplet of Higgs energy. The world rejoiced, and two of the chief theorists, Peter Higgs and François Englert, will share a Nobel Prize. But studies of the new boson suggest it could have a fatal disease.
As Joseph Lykken, a theorist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and Maria Spiropulu, of the California Institute of Technology, put it in a new paper reviewing the history and future of the Higgs boson:
“Taken at face value, the result implies that eventually (in 10^100 years or so) an unlucky quantum fluctuation will produce a bubble of a different vacuum, which will then expand at the speed of light, destroying everything.”
The idea is that the Higgs field could someday twitch and drop to a lower energy state, like water freezing into ice, thereby obliterating the workings of reality as we know it. Naturally, we would have no warning. Just blink and it’s over.
End times are part of a science reporter’s stock in trade, of course. The death of the sun, dark energy sucking galaxies, greenhouse gas catastrophes, comets and asteroids boiling the oceans, apocalyptic earthquakes and plagues are regularly paraded through these pages.
Maybe I’m just getting old and I’ve lost whatever Zen detachment I might have pretended to have, but to me this is the most depressing end-of-days vision I’ve encountered. It would be as if we’d never existed at all. Talk about a particle with Godlike properties.
But cheer up. That is only one of many scenarios that are emerging as physicists try to reconcile the CERN discovery with what they thought they knew. You might think that finding the Higgs boson, after 50 years and $10 billion or so, would bring clarity to physics and to the cosmos. But just the opposite is true: they may have found the Higgs boson, but they don’t understand it.
In particular, they don’t understand why it weighs what it does — it is about 125 times as massive as the protons that were collided to make it, not gazillions of times as heavy, as standard quantum mechanical calculations would suggest.
That is because when they do the math, physicists have to include the effects of the Higgs’s interactions with all other particles, even the ones that aren’t there, so-called virtual particles that wink in and out of existence on borrowed energy. This zooms the mass all the way up to the top of the scale, like one of those carnival games where you hit a scale with a sledgehammer: 10 quadrillion trillion electron volts, otherwise known as the Planck energy, where gravity and the other particle forces are theoretically equal.
For years the preferred solution to this conundrum has been a theory called supersymmetry, which, among other things, predicted the existence of a whole new spectrum of particles, superpartners of the ones we already know, that would cancel out the quantum calculations and keep the Higgs light. One of these particles might also be the dark matter that makes up a quarter of the universe by weight.
It’s such a beautiful theory that if Einstein were alive today he might say, as he did of his theory of general relativity, that “I would have been sorry for the dear Lord” if it were disproved.
Alas for the Lord, experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have already eliminated the simplest versions of supersymmetry. That doesn’t mean anything yet. Two years ago, many physicists were about to give up on the standard version of the Higgs boson, because it hadn’t shown up. Then it did.
Likewise, some advocates of supersymmetry are now suggesting that it could take an even more powerful collider — say, tunneling under Lake Geneva — to smoke out a supersymmetric particle.
The most talked-about alternative to supersymmetry is the idea of the multiverse, an almost infinite ensemble of universes in which the value of the Higgs — as well as many other crucial parameters — is random. We just happen to live in the one in which the conditions and parameters are fit for us. This is a notion that flows naturally from string theory and modern theories of the Big Bang, but accepting multiple universes means giving up the Einsteinian dream of a single explanation for the cosmos, a painful concession.
Steven Weinberg, of the University of Texas at Austin, who won his Nobel in 1979 for using the Higgs theory to unify two of the forces of nature, declared mournfully in The New York Review of Books: “Physical science has historically progressed not only by finding precise explanations of natural phenomena, but also by discovering what sorts of things can be precisely explained. These may be fewer than we had thought.”
But there is still hope, at least for Einstein.
In a talk this spring in Germany, Dr. Lykken called the choice between supersymmetry and multiple universes “a false dichotomy.”
There is a third way, he says, to keep the Higgs mass in bounds. That is by saying that its mass comes entirely from the virtual particles winking in and out of life around the particle. To make this scheme work, however, physicists have to abandon popular speculations of how the forces of nature are unified at “superhigh energies,” Dr. Lykken admitted in an email.
The bonus, he said, is that the same idea can generate the mass for dark matter particles, the invisible swarm in vast clouds that form the gravitational cradles for galaxies. In that case, dark matter could interact with the visible matter by means of a “dark” Higgs boson, something that will be testable in underground dark matter experiments like LUX, in South Dakota, which just announced it had come up empty so far.
It’s an exotic but hardly irrelevant subject. “The details of how dark matter works will end up determining whether the vacuum is unstable and, if so, how long it will last,” Dr. Lykken wrote.
It may all depend on the exact mass of another particle, the top quark. Gian Giudice of CERN, who did some of the first calculations of the new Higgs and found the universe teetering on Shakespearean dissolution, said, “The near criticality of the universe is the most important thing we have learned from the discovery of the Higgs boson so far.”
It might be, as Prospero put it, that we really are such stuff as dreams are made on. But we may have to wait longer than the age of the universe to find out.