Understanding the Higgs Boson

A proton-proton collision event in the CMS experiment generating two high-energy photons.

(Credit: CERN) Bio: This piece was authored by Mark Wise, the John A. McCone Professor of High Energy Physics at Caltech

The Higgs boson is an integral part of our understanding of nature. It is a particle that is an excitation of what is called the Higgs field. The Higgs field permeates all of space and when some of the fundamental particles travel through it they acquire mass. The amount of mass they acquire depends on how strongly they interact with the Higgs field. Some like the electron acquire a small mass while others acquire a much larger mass.

One peculiar aspect of this is that this Higgs field that permeates throughout all space is part of what we call empty space or the vacuum. It is only its impact on the particles that travel through it and the Higgs boson that we can observe in the laboratory. The Higgs boson lives for a very short amount of time so we don't observe it directly but rather we observe the particles it decays into and have to infer its existence from that. In the current theory we have for understanding nature we can make precise statements about what fraction of the time it decays into two photons versus two bottom quarks.

Going forward we want to see if those predictions are in agreement with the measurements from ATLAS and CMS. So this is the beginning o... [Read more]