What is the Higgs boson particle in simple terms?

The Higgs boson is the fundamental particle associated with the Higgs field, a field that gives mass to other fundamental particles such as electrons and quarks. A particle’s mass determines how much it resists changing its speed or position when it encounters a force. Not all fundamental particles have mass.

What does the Higgs boson particle do?

The Higgs boson is the particle associated with the Higgs field, an energy field that transmits mass to the things that travel through it. Peter Higgs and Francois Englert theorized way back in 1964 that this is how things in the universe – stars, planets, even people – came to have mass.

Is the Higgs boson real?

The Higgs boson, discovered at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, in 2012, is the particle that gives all other fundamental particles mass, according to the standard model of particle physics.

Can the God Particle destroy the universe?

The elusive ‘God particle’ discovered by scientists in 2012 has the potential to destroy the universe, famed British physicist Stephen Hawking has warned. According to Hawking, 72, at very high energy levels the Higgs boson, which gives shape and size to everything that exists, could become unstable.

What makes up Higgs boson?

When two protons collide within the LHC, it is their constituent quarks and gluons that interact with one another. These high-energy interactions can, through well-predicted quantum effects, produce a Higgs boson, which would immediately transform – or “decay” – into lighter particles that ATLAS and CMS could observe.

Are Higgs bosons everywhere?

The Higgs field on the other hand has a really high vacuum expectation value. “This non-zero vacuum expectation value,” Tackmann elaborates, “means that the Higgs field is everywhere.” Its omnipresence is what allows the Higgs field to affect all known massive elementary particles in the entire universe.