When the universe began, no particles had mass; they all sped around

at the speed of light. Stars, planets and life could only emerge because
particles gained their mass from a fundamental field associated with the
What is Mass? -The Higgs boson
Higgs boson. In our current description of Nature, every particle is a
1. What is the Higgs boson? wave in a field e.g., Light. The Higgs field was proposed in 1964 as a
new kind of field that fills the entire Universe and gives mass to all
elementary particles. The Higgs boson is a wave in that field. Its
2. How do particles get mass? discovery confirms the existence of the Higgs field.
3. How did we discover the Higgs boson? Particles get their mass by interacting with the Higgs field; they do not
have a mass of their own. The stronger a particle interacts with the
Higgs field, the heavier the particle ends up being.
4. What have we learned since the Higgs Higgs boson only appears in about one in a billion LHC collisions and it
immediately decays into other particles, which are then detected in
boson discovery? particle accelerator. When two protons collide within the LHC, it is their
constituent quarks and gluons that interact with one another. These
high-energy interactions can, through well-predicted quantum effects,
5. What are we going to look for next? produce a Higgs boson, which would immediately transform – or “decay”
6. How does the Higgs boson impact – into lighter particles that could be observe.
The Higgs boson is the only particle to have a spin of zero.
everyday life? They examined how strongly it interacts with other particles, to see if
this matches theoretical predictions. (Nothing much in short!)
Potential applications could include its interaction with dark matter to
see how it works. This could also explain the matter dominance over
Sources: Anti-matter.
1: Satiates our curiosity of how the world works and in search for this
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/higgs-boson-could-explain-an particle, detection and accelerator technology were pushed to the limits
timatter/ which could be used in other sectors such as defense and aerospace.