Higgs Boson : Nobel prize-winning British physicist Died
Nobel prize-winning British physicist Peter Higgs, who proposed the existence of a mass-giving particle, which became known as the Higgs boson or the “God particle”, has died aged 94.
- The Higgs boson is the fundamental force-carrying particle of the Higgs field, which is responsible for granting fundamental particles their mass.
- This field was first proposed in the mid-sixties by Peter Higgs, for whom the particle is named.
- The particle was finally discovered in 2012, by researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, located at the European particle physics laboratory CERN, Switzerland.
- The LHC confirmed the existence of the Higgs field and the mechanism that gives rise to mass and thus completed the standard model of particle physics.
- It is one of the 17 elementary particles that make up the Standard Model of particle physics, which is scientists’ best theory about the behaviours of the universe’s most basic building blocks.
- Higgs boson plays such a fundamental role in subatomic physics that it is sometimes referred to as the “God particle.”
- The Higgs boson has a mass of 125 billion electron volts, meaning it is 130 times more massive than a proton.
- It is also chargeless with zero spin, a quantum mechanical equivalent to angular momentum.
- It is the only elementary particle with no spin.
