20 lines
2.1 KiB
HTML
20 lines
2.1 KiB
HTML
The Higgs Mechanism
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When you are in a room filled with jelly, every movement will be difficult - just like if you were much heavier than you really are. In a similar way, something called the Higgs field fills the universe, making every particle feel massive through the interaction with the Higgs field.
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This way, the particles will acquire masses, but why are they are different from one another? Much the same way a large person will “feel” the jelly stronger than a small person will, the different particle types will feel the Higgs field differently. Switching to physicists speech: The strength of the interactions between the particles and the Higgs field are different. In a way, this does not answer the question, because it only relates the masses of the particles to their couplings to the Higgs field - but it is the best we can do!
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What about the Higgs boson?
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In a room filled with jelly, not only the jelly affects you, but also you affect the jelly. If you punch the jelly, it will move. And if you punch it in the right way, there will be waves running through the jelly.
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We know already that photons can be viewed as particles and waves at the same point. In a way, the Higgs Boson is a wave in the Higgs field - a wave in the jelly, that we can try to create by shaking and punching the jelly in the right way.
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Experimental particle physicists have been trying to do exactly this with the LHC: To collide particles in a way that will create an excitation (or wave, if you want) in the Higgs field - because measuring the wave in the field is the only way for us to know that the field is actually there.
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What now?
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The journey of particle physics is not over. There are still a lot of things we do not fully understand - some of them we have already mentioned, some others (like the mystery of Dark Matter) you might have heard about.
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If you read everything up to now - congratulations! We also have exciting quizzes, where you can test your knowledge about the Standard Model, and additional chapters on Feynman diagrams - the little sketches physicists love to use to explain what they are doing. Hang on!
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