Understanding the Higgs Boson

Unless you have been hiding under a rock somewhere you will almost certainly have seen the news that the Higgs boson has been 'discovered', I say this tentatively as it has not officially been confirmed just a 'Higgs-like' particle has been observed. But what even is the Higgs boson?

By the 1970s physicists had devised what is known as the "Standard Model" of particle physics - it is a theory of the elementary particles, how they interact with each other and what these interactions mean. The elementary particles can be broken down into two core categories: fermions and bosons. Fermions are matter particles, they are what make protons, atoms, stars and us, whereas bosons are what helps the fermions to "communicate", this communication is called a force.

The standard model predicted the existence of a lot of particles far before they were discovered: the bottom quark, top quark, tau neutrino and the Higgs boson. All of these particles were required for the standard model to work in it's current form. In 1964 Peter Higgs (as well as Robert Brout and Francois Englert) devised a theory (that was later proven) for how elementary particles are able to have mass, this was called the Higgs mechanism.

The Higgs mechanism requires a field pervading through the whole universe and depending on how particles interact with this field dictates what mass they have, this is called the Higgs field. In quantum theory when a field interacts with another object it acts as a particle. In the electromagnetic field this particle is a photon, in the Higgs field the particle is the Higgs boson. The discovery of this particle means that the equations that are currently in place are correct and able to describe every particle we know about and how these particles interact together via the forces incorporated in the standard model (all except gravity), so essentially we now certainly understand the quantum world to a great deal of precision!

The reason the Higgs boson has eluded us for so long is that it is very, very unstable and decays incredibly quickly - in fact it only exists for approximately one zeptosecond, a thousandth of a billionth of a billionth of a second. Because it exists for such a short amount of time you have to observe the after effects of a collision and map how much energy the produced particles have and compare this to what you would expect if a Higgs boson had decayed, the problem is that it can decay into a lot of things. So you have to perform a lot of high energy collisions between particles, observe the data and see if it fits the predictions about how the Higgs boson should behave.

Properties of Higgs Boson:

Mass: 126 GeV/c2 which is equivalent to 2.25 × 10-25kg or 134 protons.
It has no electric charge or spin
Read about how the Higgs interacts with other particles

But is this it? Do we understand everything now that we have discovered the long elusive 'God particle' (a terrible, terrible term coined by the media)? The answer is a wonderfully fanatic, no! Thankfully. In fact, the discovery really means that we can now raise more questions and further advance our understanding of everything. At the smallest scale gravity is still a total mystery to us, it is not incorporated into the current standard model at all - one of the most primitive every day forces is still a complete mystery to us! Quantum mechanics and general relativity need to be united before we can even begin to ponder that we understand everything, we are some way off from a theory of everything but the best hat in the ring currently is string theory.

Just as one final note, the Higgs boson has not been officially confirmed as to existing but that a new, previously unknown boson with a mass between 125-127 GeV/c2 that has behaviour "consistent with" a Higgs particle. Further analysis is required to fully confirm it's existence but a very cautious tick is currently next to it!