On Tuesday, two particle physicists won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the theoretical discovery of the Higgs particle, which unifies the Standard Model of particle physics.
In 1964, Peter W. Higgs of the University of Edinburgh and François Englert of the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, with his now deceased colleague Robert Brout, independently described a particle, known as the Higgs, that gives all other particles their mass. In July 2012, the CERN laboratory outside Geneva, Switzerland announced its confirmed discovery of such a particle.
Higgs and Englert will split the $1.2 million prize, awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
“I hope this recognition of fundamental science will help raise awareness of the value of blue-sky research,” Higgs said in a statement released by the University of Edinburgh.
Before the laureates proposed their theories, the Standard Model was flawed because its equations only worked in a universe with massless particles. Englert, Brout and Higgs were the first to describe the mechanism of the Higgs field, solving the dilemma of the almost-perfect model that had been puzzling physicists.
The Standard Model outlines the universe in terms of matter particles, the building blocks of everything from stars to people, and force particles, which mediate the forces that govern the interactions between different matter particles: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. Connected to these are corresponding fields that permeate the universe, such as the electromagnetic field and the gravitational field.
The Higgs particle is a special kind of particle that is a vibration of the Higgs field and is the crucial cornerstone of the Standard Model.
This field, which is unlike the other fields in that it never approaches zero strength, gives all elementary particles their mass. Particles that interact strongly with the field are heavy, those that interact that weakly are lighter in mass, and particles that do not interact at all, such as photons, have no mass. So without the constant presence of the Higgs field, electrons, quarks, and other particles would be massless, and all matter would collapse.
Last year, 3,000 scientists at CERN confirmed the nearly fifty-year-old theory with the discovery of the Higgs particle, confirmed to five standard deviations. By sending protons around the circular Large Hadron Collider tunnel at 99.99999 percent the speed of light, researchers were able to observe 40 million collisions per second. When particles collide at such high speeds, the energy released is enough to create new particles. After years of collisions, the two main detectors at CERN, ATLAS and CMS, detected the creation of a particle with just the right mass — about a hundred times heavier than a proton — to be the Higgs particle.
The existence of the Higgs gives us fundamental information about the underlying symmetry of the universe: similar to how a chair is the same size and shape from any angle you look, the Standard Model should be the same from any perspective in time or space. The Higgs field appears to break this symmetry, but in a way that allows it to provide other particles with mass.
Though the Higgs solves some of the puzzles of the Standard Model, it doesn’t answer all of the questions, like that of the matter we can’t detect — dark matter.
