How the Higgs Field (Actually) Gives Mass to Elementary Particles
Published in The Quantum World.
The Quantum World !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012 confirmed what we particle physicists had long suspected: that there is a field permeating the cosmos that generates the masses of elementary particles. Unfortunately, physicists have found it challenging to explain to everyone else how this so-called Higgs field accomplishes its mighty task.
A common approach has been to tell a tall tale. Here’s one version:
There’s this substance, like a soup, that fills the universe; that’s the Higgs field. As particles move through it, the soup slows them down, and that’s how particles get mass.
Other versions portray the Higgs field as akin to molasses, a thicket, a crowd of people or an expanse of snow.
However, all such stories conflict with what we physicists teach in the very first weeks of first-year university courses. By suggesting that the Higgs field creates mass by exerting drag, they violate both Newton’s first and second laws of motion. Among other disasters, this drag would long ago have caused the Earth to spiral into the Sun. Moreover, if the Higgs field were really a substance, it would provide a point of comparison against which we could measure our absolute motion, violating both Galileo’s and Einstein’s principles of relativity.
In truth, the Higgs field has nothing to do with motion or slowing. Instead, its story is all about vibration.
Quantum field theory, the powerful framework of modern particle physics, says the universe is filled with fields. Examples include the electromagnetic field, the gravitational field and the Higgs field itself. For each field, there’s a corresponding type of particle, best understood as a little ripple in that field. The electromagnetic field’s ripples are light waves, and its gentlest ripples are the particles of light, which we call photons. Similarly, electrons are ripples in the electron field, and the Higgs boson is a minimal ripple in the Higgs field.