![]() In other words, if you're going to propose the existence of a Higgs field at high energies, you don't get any choice but to construct four – it's baked into the fundamental symmetries of our universe. The reason there are precisely four isn't that there's a rigged matching game the same deep symmetries that lead to the electroweak unification also provide the mathematical machinery for constructing four Higgs fields. Making the splitĪt that high-energy, symmetric state, not only are there four massless carries of the electroweak force, but there are also four Higgs fields. But at low (read: normal, everyday) energies, that unified symmetric force breaks apart to become the awkwardly-split-but-still-have-to-live-together electromagnetic force (carried by the still-massless photon) and weak nuclear force (carried by a much heavier trio of particles).Īnd the cause of the split is the good ol' Higgs (which you may have guessed, because that's the focus of this article). Mathematically, these particles and their associated force are in a highly symmetric state. This force appears only at high energies, and a quartet of massless particles carry it. You read that right: three, not four! There's strong nuclear, gravity, and a strange hybrid of electromagnetic and weak nuclear called, appropriately enough, the electroweak force. One clue to this perplexing mystery is that, at high enough energy densities - like, say, in the business end of a particle collider - there are only three forces of nature. In the boson world, the electromagnetic force is completely different from the weak nuclear force in terms of mass, range, and interactions, and their respective force carriers aren't even on speaking terms, let alone related to each other.īut why? Really, why? Why are the forces of nature so dang different? It's nothing at all like the families of fermions: In that realm, a simple change of charge or different measure of mass will get you a new kind of particle. These four forces of nature are, as you may have noticed, radically different from one another. And gravity is carried by … well, perhaps that's a subject for another day. The photon carries the electromagnetic force, while the W+, W-and Z bosons carry the weak nuclear force and a set of gluons carries the strong nuclear force. ![]() Physicists observe four forces of nature: electromagnetic, strong nuclear, weak nuclear and gravity. The "interesting thing" that the Higgs boson does in the universe relates to a fundamental question of modern physics. Speaking of work: It's the Higgs field, not the Higgs particle, that's doing interesting things in the universe. Machines like the Large Hadron Collider are trying to study the Higgs field, but the only way to do so is to make some Higgs particles (i.e., some slaps in the field) and see how they work. I'm spending a couple of paragraphs making this distinction clear because the hunt for the Higgs boson isn't about the particle itself. Every kind of particle that scientists know of, from the electron to a photon, is associated with its own space-time-filling vibrating field. A single particle is just the minimum possible amount of energy that a field can support. In other words, you can slap a field and make some particles. In this view (and indeed, in reality), particles can be created and destroyed at will, simply by adding or removing energy from the field. This field can take different values at different points in space-time, and each value corresponds to the average number of particles observers see in that patch. No, in the contemporary view of the rules of the universe, the primary physical object is the field, an entity that permeates all of space and time. Field of dreamsīut modern particle physics isn't really about the particles themselves, and that goes for the Higgs boson, too. So right there, the name gives you a hint: Because this particle is called a "boson," it must have something to do with forces. Meanwhile, the bosons are the forces between them: photons, gluons and so on. Think electrons, quarks, protons, neutrinos and all their friends. Very, very loosely, you can think of fermions as the building blocks of the everyday world. ![]() "Boson" is the term for one of the two kinds of particles in the universe, with the other called a "fermion" (after Enrico Fermi).
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