Understanding Higgs Boson

There are more than 200 subatomic particles known today; not all of them are stable though--exist of as short a while as a millionth of a second. The action of forces is understood to be due to exchange of "force" particles. The Standard Model is the one that is agreed upon by most as the complete explanation of subatomic particles categorized according their forces--the weak, the strong and the electromagnetic. So, it is proposed by the Standard Model that mass of everything is created due to thing's interaction with the so called Higgs Field which is everywhere, even in Vacuum. The reason why this field was thought to exist was upon observing the mass of electron being 40 times that of its original inside a crystal lattice--under the effect of attraction from surrounding atoms. This same interaction inside the crystal has a particle equivalent--the phonon; Higgs field has particle Higgs Boson. weak force, a fundamental force of nature that underlies some forms of radioactivity, governs the decay of unstable subatomic particles such as mesons, and initiates the nuclear fusion reaction that fuels the Sun. The weak force acts upon all known fermionsi.e., elementary particles with half-integer values of intrinsic angular momentum, or spin. Particles interact through the weak force by exchanging force-carrier particles known as the W and Z particles. These particles are heavy, with masses about 100 times the mass of a proton, and it is their heaviness that defines the extremely short-range nature of the weak force and that makes the weak force appear weak at the low energies associated with radioactivity. The whole point of LHC is in being able to find a particle with mass less than 1 TeV as per theory. This particle is supposed to most likely be observed with W and Z particles[the particles which are the reason of existence of Weak Forces] emitted during collision reactions common to all accelerators. W and Z particles were verified to exist in a CERN experiment back in 1986. The interesting thing about the W and Z particles is that they are to Weak Forces what photon is to Electromagnetic Forces and yet the mass of W and Z is some 200,000 times that of photon[yes, it is not massless for experimental physicist]. This pushed physicists to think what give a specific mass to a thing. Bosons are either vector or scalars. So, let's first of all read a bit about different sub-atomic particles.

Sub-atomic Particles
First the proton was identified and later the neutron. This seemed to be all that was needed to explain the composition of the hundreds of different nuclei. But the picture began to get

complicated as mesons and antiparticles such as the positron were found. More particles were discovered.

The Coding of Qualitative Information About Particles

Particles seemed to fall into groups and it was convenient to code that qualitative information about group membership as numbers, usually 0 and 1, 1 if the particle had a certain characteristic and 0 if not. Charge could be coded as +1, 0 and -1. Heavy particles associated with the nucleus of atoms such as proton, neutron and mesons were called

baryons and given a baryon number B equal to 1. This distinguished them from the lighter
particles such as the electron which were called leptons and had a baryon number equal to 0. After the neutron was discovered and its properties, except for charge, were found to be so similar to the proton Werner Heisenberg conjectured the proton and neutron were simply different states of the same particle, Heisenberg characterized the property that distinguished a proton nucleon from a neutron nucleon as isospin and gave the proton an isospin of +1/2 and the neutron nucleon an isospin of -1/2. When certain particle transitions were found not to occur even though they did not violate the conservation of energy and conservation of charge and the other conservation principles some physicists conjured up a strangeness property of particles and a corresponding conservation principle, the conservation of strangeness number to explain the nonoccurrence of transitions. The transitions did not occur because they did not conserve the strangeness number, again 0 and 1.

Further Observations
When small stars die and their source of fusion energy is gone, gravity overcomes the pressure of their gasses. The atoms are stripped of their electrons, and the nuclei and electrons are compressed more and more until some other force, if one strong enough exits, balances gravity. In white dwarf stars it is the pressure of the electrons that stops the contraction. What is left is still familiar, a gas of electrons and the nuclei of the atoms. Yet if the star is too massive, more than about 1.4 times the Sun's mass, the pressure the electrons exert on one another is not enough to stop gravity. Now electrons and protons collide within the nuclei with enough energy to form neutrons. Since there are exactly as many electrons as protons in the star, only neutrons now exist. It is the pressure of the neutrons on one another, physically staying out of each other's space, that keeps the star from catastrophic collapse under the

force of its own gravity. The star is a giant nucleus! With a little more than twice the Sun's mass, the neutron pressure is not enough, and the star gives in to the inevitable. We do not know of any other force that will stop the collapse of a very massive star. The result we see from outside is a black hole. What happened to the neutrons? Neutrons are squeezed down into their component quarks, the fundamental particles of matter as we know it. Just as protons, neutrons and electrons make up atoms, there are subatomic particles that make up protons and neutrons. An electron seems to be structureless. A proton is made of 2 up quarks and 1 down quark, while 1 up quark and 2 down quarks make a neutron. . The electron's antiparticle, its exact opposite, is the positron with +1 unit of charge. Put the two together in a collision and what do you get? That's right. Nothing but energy. How do quarks give the proton +1 charge and no charge to the neutron? It turns out if the "up" quark has +2/3 of a unit of charge, and the "down" quark has -1/3 unit, then it works just right. A neutron has a tiny bit more mass than a proton, which is why it will decay into a proton and an electron given about 15 minutes outside a nucleus. Since one kind of quark can change into another kind, and there are a zoo of other particles as well, this is even more confusing. There are neutrinos, produced inside stars when fusion occurs. They zip through us and the Earth all the time but hardly ever interact with baryons. Cold dark matter is abundantly present in our galaxy and others, providing the glue that holds stars in their orbits. We do not know what it is, but there seems to be more of it than the baryons that we can touch. neutrino, elementary subatomic particle with no electric charge, very little mass, and 1/2 unit of spin. Neutrinos belong to the family of particles called leptons, which are not subject to the strong force. Rather, neutrinos are subject to the weak force that underlies certain processes of radioactive decay. There are three types of neutrino, each associated with a charged leptoni.e., the electron, the muon, and the tauand therefore given the corresponding names electron-neutrino, muonneutrino, and tau-neutrino. Each type of neutrino also has an antimatter component, called an antineutrino; the term neutrino is sometimes used in a general sense to refer to both the neutrino and its antiparticle. meson, any member of a family of subatomic particles composed of a quark and an antiquark. Mesons are sensitive to the strong force, the fundamental interaction that binds the components of the nucleus by governing the behaviour of their constituent quarks. Predicted theoretically in 1935 by the Japanese physicist Yukawa Hideki, the existence of mesons was confirmed in 1947 by a team led by the English physicist Cecil Frank Powell with the discovery of the pi-meson (pion) in cosmic-ray particle interactions. More than 200 mesons have been produced and characterized in the intervening years, most in high-energy

particle-accelerator experiments. All mesons are unstable, with lifetimes ranging from 10 8 second to less than 1022 second. They also vary widely in mass, from 140 megaelectron volts (MeV; 106 eV) to nearly 10 gigaelectron volts (GeV; 109 eV). The decay rate of the pimeson into two photons was used to support the hypothesis that quarks can take on one of three colours. Studies of the competing decay modes of K-mesons, which occur via the weak force, have led to a better understanding of parity (the property of an elementary particle or physical system that indicates whether its mirror image occurs in nature) and its non-conservation in the weak interaction. CP violation (the violation of the combined conservation laws associated with charge [C] and parity [P]) was discovered first in the Kmeson system and is under investigation in B-mesons (which contain bottom quarks). Quarks associate with one another via the strong force to make up protons and neutrons, in much the same way that the latter particles combine in various proportions to make up atomic nuclei. There are six types, or flavours, of quarks that differ from one another in their mass and charge characteristics. These six quark flavours can be grouped in three pairs: up and down, charm and strange, and top and bottom. Quarks appear to be true elementary particles; that is, they have no apparent structure and cannot be resolved into something smaller. In addition, however, quarks always seem to occur in combination with other quarks or with antiquarks, their antiparticles, to form all hadronsthe so-called strongly interacting particles that encompass both baryons and mesons. The interpretation of quarks as actual physical entities initially posed two major problems. First, quarks had to have half-integer spin (intrinsic angular momentum) values for the model to work, but at the same time they seemed to violate the Pauli exclusion principle, which governs the behaviour of all particles (called fermions) having odd half-integer spin. In many of the baryon configurations constructed of quarks, sometimes two or even three identical quarks had to be set in the same quantum statean arrangement prohibited by the exclusion principle. Second, quarks appeared to defy being freed from the particles they made up. Although the forces binding quarks were strong, it seemed improbable that they were powerful enough to withstand bombardment by high-energy particle beams from accelerators. These problems were resolved by the introduction of the concept of colour, as formulated in quantum chromodynamics (QCD). In this theory of strong interactions, whose breakthrough ideas were published in 1973, colour has nothing to do with the colours of the everyday world but rather represents a property of quarks that is the source of the strong force. The colours red, green, and blue are ascribed to quarks, and their opposites, antired, antigreen, and antiblue, are ascribed to antiquarks. According to QCD, all combinations of quarks must contain mixtures of these imaginary colours that cancel out one another, with the resulting

particle having no net colour. A baryon, for example, always consists of a combination of one red, one green, and one blue quark and so never violates the exclusion principle. The property of colour in the strong force plays a role analogous to that of electric charge in the electromagnetic force, and just as charge implies the exchange of photons between charged particles, so does colour involve the exchange of massless particles called gluons among quarks. Just as photons carry electromagnetic force, gluons transmit the forces that bind quarks together. Quarks change their colour as they emit and absorb gluons, and the exchange of gluons maintains proper quark colour distribution.