GOD PARTICLE.....

"God Particle" or "Higgs boson" , ever wondered what it is actually? you might have ignored it saying " Apne bas ke bahar hai...." or " It's beyond our level " well don't worry we will try to simplify it for you....

 In school, we all learned to define mass as a measure of the ‘inertia’ of a body, and understand ‘inertia’ i.e. the innate resistance of a body to a change its state of movement (of which rest is a special case). The question that arises is why do we resist change in movement? Why is there a difference between the amounts of force required to make different bodies move? For a long time scientists have been postulating that there is something very fundamental about this resistance to change but have not been able to pin it down. Now they have.

Various subatomic particles are responsible for providing different properties to a particular matter. One of the most cryptic and important property is mass. Protons and neutrons have mass while photons don’t have mass. Ever marveled where this mass comes from? An elementary particle, the Higgs boson, or “God particle,” is believed to be the particle which gives mass to matter which is discovery of Higgs Boson.

Let me take an analogy. If you walk on land it is easier than walking in water—clearly our inertia—for the same mass is different depending on the surrounding medium. So physicists postulated that even when we think there is vacuum, there is some ‘field’ pervading the Universe and when we move, this field resists our movement—like water particles that resist our movement in water.

But to go back to the above analogy, the additional resistance we feel in water is because water particles are dense and hard to push.

The similar particle of Higgs field was the Higgs particle. But the exact nature of the Higgs particle was not known and hence the detailed properties of this field that we experience as resistance to motion were not understood.

 It is like a fish in the sea not being aware of the water molecule. Once the fish knows the water particles and its properties, it will understand why hot water is easier to swim and why does water freeze at a certain time. Just as a round or flat fish faces more resistance than a streamlined fish—a body which sticks more with the Higgs field will face greater resistance in the Higgs field and hence will have more inertia. Simple.

This undated image made available by CERN shows a typical candidate event in the search for the Higgs boson, including two high-energy photons whose energy (depicted by green lines) is measured in the CMS electromagnetic calorimeter. The yellow lines are the measured tracks of other particles produced in the collision.  

…these particles are just packages of energy of some kind of field. “In this theory, there is such a background field. And the background field and its interaction with all the other stuff that goes through, is responsible for generating the mass of the particles.

In March 2013, researcher’s analysis of data from CERN regarding boson research said it “strongly indicated” the finding of the particle that scientists say is a building block of the universe. Hence God Particle….

So what’s next? Well, we can continue to use the example of the fish in water, for world in Higgs field. Now since we know the exact nature of this particle that is giving us resistance we can look at it in detail. We can start asking questions like why is the resistance to Higgs Field exactly identical to the pull of gravity—why is our inertia same as our mass? We can also look for other properties of Higgs field—its relation to formation of the Universe—to the formation of fundamental particles and so on. We can also start worrying about the Higgs field and the birth of the Universe and its relation to other aspects of the Universe.

Anushri Joshi

University of Delhi