Higgs boson

The Higgs boson is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics. It is the quantum excitation of the Higgs field—a fundamental field of crucial importance to particle physics theory, first suspected to exist in the 1960s, that unlike other known fields such as the electromagnetic field, takes a non-zero constant value almost everywhere. The question of the Higgs field's existence has been the last unverified part of the Standard Model of particle physics and, according to some, "the central problem in particle physics".

The presence of this field, now believed to be confirmed, explains why some fundamental particles have mass when, based on the symmetries controlling their interactions, they should be massless. The existence of the Higgs field would also resolve several other long-standing puzzles, such as the reason for the weak force's extremely short range.

Higgs

Higgs may refer to:

Physics

People

Peter Higgs

Peter Ware Higgs CH FRS FRSE (born 29 May 1929) is a British theoretical physicist, emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh, and Nobel Prize laureate for his work on the mass of subatomic particles.

In the 1960s, he proposed that broken symmetry in electroweak theory could explain the origin of mass of elementary particles in general and of the W and Z bosons in particular. This so-called Higgs mechanism, which was proposed by several physicists besides Higgs at about the same time, predicts the existence of a new particle, the Higgs boson, the detection of which became one of the great goals of physics.CERN announced on 4 July 2012 that they had experimentally established the existence of a Higgs-like boson, but further work would be needed to analyse its properties and see whether it had the properties expected from the Standard Model Higgs boson. On 14 March 2013, the newly discovered particle was tentatively confirmed to be + parity and zero spin, two fundamental criteria of a Higgs boson, making it the first known fundamental scalar particle to be discovered in nature. The Higgs mechanism is generally accepted as an important ingredient in the Standard Model of particle physics, without which certain particles would have no mass.

Michio Kaku

Michio Kaku (/ˈmiːtʃioʊ ˈkɑːkuː/; born January 24, 1947) is a Japanese-American futurist, theoretical physicist and popularizer of science. Kaku is a Professor of Theoretical Physics at the City College of New York. He has written several books about physics and related topics, has made frequent appearances on radio, television, and film, and writes online blogs and articles. He has written three New York Times Best Sellers: Physics of the Impossible (2008), Physics of the Future (2011), and The Future of the Mind (2014). Kaku has hosted several TV specials for the BBC, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, and the Science Channel.

Early life and education

Kaku was born in San Jose, California, to Japanese American parents. His father, born in California and educated in both Japan and the United States, was fluent in Japanese and English. Both his parents were interned in the Tule Lake War Relocation Center during World War II, where they met and where his older brother was born.

Don Lincoln

Don Lincoln (born 1964) is an American particle physics researcher at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and adjunct Professor of Physics at the University of Notre Dame. He received a Ph.D. in experimental particle physics from Rice University in 1994. In 1995, he was a codiscoverer of the top quark. He has coauthored hundreds of research papers and, more recently, was a member of the team finding evidence for the Higgs boson.

Lincoln is a public speaker and science writer and has contributed many science articles in magazines that include Analog Science Fiction and Fact in July 2009, Scientific American in November 2012 and July 2015, and The Physics Teacher at least six times. He is also the author of books describing particle physics written for the public. They are "Understanding the Universe: From Quarks to the Cosmos (Revised edition)" (2012) and "The Quantum Frontier: The Large Hadron Collider" (2009) and "The Large Hadron Collider: The Extraordinary Story of the Higgs Boson and Other Things That Will Blow Your Mind" (2014). In 2013, he released a book called "Alien Universe: Extraterrestrials in our Minds and in the Cosmos," which explains how the common images of extraterrestrials came to enter Western culture and then goes on to explore what modern physics, chemistry and biology can tell us about what real intelligent alien life might be like. He been involved in a number of videos dedicated to dessiminating discoveries in particle physics and since July 7, 2011 has been a keynote speaker for a series produced by Fermilab that explores the range of issues dominating particle physics today in an accessible and sometime humorous way. Among the topics included in the series are the Higgs Boson, Anti-matter, the nature of Neutrinos, the concepts of the Big Bang, Cosmic Inflation, the Multiverse and Supersymmetry.