Peter Higgs, the British physicist known for his theory of the mass-giving particle, the Higgs boson, which earned him the Nobel Prize for Physics, has passed away at the age of 94.
About Peter Higgs:
- Peter Higgs (1929–2024) was a British theoretical physicist, known for his work on the mass of subatomic particles.
- He was a professor at the University of Edinburgh.
- Higgs’ 1964 theory proposed a mass-giving particle, later termed the Higgs boson or the God particle.
- Higgs and Belgian physicist Francois Englert won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for their 1964 theory of the Higgs boson.
- Higgs’s primary contribution was the prediction of the Higgs field and boson, reflected in roughly a dozen papers throughout his career, with only one co-authored.
About Higgs theory:
Higgs Field:
- The Higgs field is a hypothetical energy field that permeates all of space.
- According to the theory, particles gain mass by interacting with this field.
- The Higgs field is assumed to have a non-zero value even in a vacuum.
Higgs Mechanism:
- The Higgs mechanism describes how particles acquire mass through their interactions with the Higgs field.
- Particles that interact more strongly with the Higgs field experience greater resistance, leading to a higher mass.
- Particles that do not interact with the Higgs field remain massless.
- Photons, the particles of light, lack mass because they do not interact with Higgs bosons.
Higgs Boson:
- The Higgs boson, sometimes called the Higgs particle, is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics produced by the quantum excitation of the Higgs field.
- It is the particle associated with the fluctuations or vibrations of the Higgs field.
- Its discovery confirms the existence of the Higgs field and validates the Higgs mechanism.
- The Higgs boson is produced in high-energy particle collisions and quickly decays into other particles, making its direct detection challenging.
Electroweak Symmetry Breaking:
- The Higgs mechanism is responsible for breaking the electroweak symmetry, which unifies the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force at high energies.
- As the universe cooled after the Big Bang, the Higgs field settled into its lowest energy state, causing the electroweak symmetry to break and giving rise to the masses of the W and Z bosons, which mediate the weak nuclear force.
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