Forces in the Standard Model are transmitted by particles known as gauge bosons. (A separate theory, general relativity, is used for gravity.) In the Standard Model, the particles and forces in nature (other than gravity) arise from properties of quantum fields, known as gauge invariance and symmetries. Physicists explain the fundamental particles and forces of our universe in terms of the Standard Model – a widely accepted framework based on quantum field theory that predicts almost all known particles and forces other than gravity with great accuracy. Introduction Standard Model of particle physics
The new particle was subsequently confirmed to match the expected properties of a Higgs boson. This particle was called the Higgs boson, and could be used to test whether the Higgs field was the correct explanation.Īfter a 40 year search, a subatomic particle with the expected properties was discovered in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland.
(All fundamental particles that were known at the time should be massless at very high energies, but fully explaining how some particles gain mass at lower energies had been extremely difficult.) If these ideas were correct, a particle known as a scalar boson should also exist, with certain properties. Its " Mexican hat-shaped" potential leads it to take a nonzero value everywhere (including otherwise empty space), which breaks the weak isospin symmetry of the electroweak interaction, and via the Higgs mechanism gives some particles mass.īoth the field and the boson are named after physicist Peter Higgs, who in 1964, along with five other scientists in three teams, proposed the Higgs mechanism, a way that some particles can acquire mass. The Higgs field is a scalar field, with two neutral and two electrically charged components that form a complex doublet of the weak isospin SU(2) symmetry. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately. In the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a massive scalar boson with zero spin, even (positive) parity, no electric charge, and no colour charge, that couples to (interacts with) mass. 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, one of the fields in particle physics theory. Two leptons and a photon (Dalitz decay via virtual photon) (tentatively observed at sigma 3.2 (1 in 1000) significance).