The ATLAS instrument at the Large Hadron Collider. "We've spent the last 10 years testing the Higgs boson, because discovering it was one thing, but the Standard Model also tells us lots of things about the way the Higgs boson should behave," Martin said. (Thanks to Einstein's special relativity, particle physicists know that mass and energy are interchangeable and so refer to masses in terms of their energy.) Only one fundamental particle known to science is more massive.ĭiscovering the Higgs boson and measuring its mass was only the beginning. And measurements by the LHC have shown that the Higgs boson has a high mass as well: 125 billion electronvolts, which is about 125 times more massive than one of the positively charged protons at an atom's core. Just like these particles, scientists believe - although they have yet to watch the process happen - that the Higgs boson also gets its mass from interacting with itself. For other particles, wading through the cosmic treacle of the Higgs field slows them down, giving them more mass, and therefore these particles are the most massive. Less massive particles pass through the Higgs field relatively effortlessly, and so they can fly off at the speed of light - think of electrons, which have a tiny mass, or photons, which have no mass at all. One analogy is to think of the Higgs field as a kind of cosmic treacle that slows down some particles more than others. "Particle physics has changed more in the past 10 years than in the previous 30 years." - Gian Giudice "It permeates all the way across space and time." It's the interaction between certain particles and the Higgs boson, which represents the Higgs field, that gives those particles their mass. "The field is more fundamental than the particles," Martin said. The Higgs boson is important because it carries the force of an energy field known as the Higgs field, in much the same way that a photon carries the force of the electromagnetic field. "Particle physics has changed more in the past 10 years than in the previous 30 years," Gian Giudice, head of CERN's theoretical physics department, said during the event. The Higgs boson changed the world of particle physics, opening doors that had been slammed shut until its discovery.
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