Ask Ethan: Can you explain the Higgs boson in depth?
One of the great quests in all of science is to discover, at a fundamental level, what the Universe is actually made of. If you took every amount of matter and energy that existed — or even could exist — and cut it up into its smallest possible chunks, until only something that was uncuttable was left, you’d be left with the fundamental, elementary particles that composed our Universe. In…
The Higgs boson is a unique and fundamental particle in the Standard Model of particle physics, discovered at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012. It plays a crucial role in explaining why other particles have mass. Unlike other particles such as quarks, leptons, and gauge bosons, the Higgs boson is associated with the Higgs field, which permeates all of space.
As particles interact with this field, they acquire mass proportional to the strength of their interaction with the Higgs field. The Higgs boson itself is a quantum excitation of the Higgs field, and its discovery confirmed the existence of the field and its properties. Through collider experiments, physicists have measured the Higgs boson's rest mass, spin, decay products, and branching ratios, providing a deeper understanding of its role in the Standard Model and the fundamental structure of the Universe.
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