God particle and Higgs - Technology 2012

What is Higgs?

The Higgs boson is the massive and fleetingly short-lived boson associated with a Higgs field, and also the Higgs field's smallest possible excitation, or  quantum .  In addition to explaining how mass is acquired by vector bosons, the Higgs mechanism also predicts the ratio between the  W boson and Z boson  masses as well as their  couplings  with each other and with the Standard Model quarks and leptons.  The possible discovery of the Higgs boson would not have been splashed across every major media if the tag "God particle" weren't attached to it.

The Higgs boson is a predicted member of a class of subatomic particles named after the 20th-century Calcutta physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, and proposed by the British physicist Peter Higgs and others in the 1960s as a mechanism to explain the origin of mass.  The Higgs boson is the physics particle that gives other particles their mass .     "The Higgs boson:  Evolution or revolution?”  According to the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a boson , a type of particle that allows multiple identical particles to exist in the same place in the same  quantum state .

 "Higgs boson particle results could be a quantum leap" .  If the Higgs field does not exist, according to theory, the universe would be a very different place.  The full properties of the Higgs (or whatever was observed by the teams) are not yet known.  The Higgs boson has only a fleeting existence and is predicted to decay through multiple channels that create other subatomic or fundamental particles.  Experiments to try to show whether the Higgs boson did or did not exist began in the 1980s, but until the 2000s it could only be said that certain areas were plausible, or ruled out.

The Higgs boson is the last, missing link in the highly successful quantum theory of particles, called the Standard Model.  ^      "Combined Standard Model Higgs Boson Searches in pp Collisions at vs = 7 TeV with the ATLAS Experiment at the LHC” ATLAS Note (24 July 2011) (pdf) The ATLAS Collaboration.  The Higgs boson is the physics particle that gives other particles their mass.  The Higgs boson is often referred to as the  ‘God Particle'  by individuals outside the scientific community, after the title of Leon Lederman's popular science book on particle physics,  ‘The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?  ‘While use of this term may have contributed to increased media interest, many scientists dislike it, since it is sensational and overstates the particle's importance.  In the standard model the Higgs field does not interact with all fundamental particles, but only some of them.

What is God Particle? 

God Particle has nothing to do with God.  As reported previously, the other lab is also researching on the God Particle, Fermilab in Illinois, revealed that its findings have not been enough to be a "discovery", can only be said to be "proof".  Physicists have been trying to find the "God particle" (the Higgs boson) for over forty years, so it's no real surprise that they finally did it.  The Higgs boson is often referred to as the  ‘God Particle'  by individuals outside the scientific community, after the title of Leon Lederman's popular science book on particle physics,  ‘The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?  ‘While use of this term may have contributed to increased media interest, many scientists dislike it, since it is sensational and overstates the particle's importance.

The God Particle is a scientific (non-religious) euphemism for the Higgs boson.  Somewhere along the line, a publicist, a blogger or some other brand of simpleton shortened the Higgs' ignominious moniker to " the God particle " and thus we await an announcement from a team of men heading up the most expensive research facility in history that they have discovered something the lay press will report as so significant it outranks finding Isaac Asimov's head in a crystal box buried four thousand years ago by an unknown race at Machu Pichu.  They call it the God particle.  Physicists welcomed July Fourth with intellectual fireworks, announcing "preliminary" results pointing to the discovery of the long-sought "God particle.

Tantalizing hints of a predicted but unseen subatomic particle, the last piece of an elegant theory of physics, have emerged for the first time through independent search experiments but uncertainty over what has been spotted persists.  If we let it, Christmas has a certain Higgs-boson quality to it.