Higgs Boson: a hypothetical ►elementary particle postulated to account for the interaction of particles of matter with the (likewise hypothetical) Higgs field.

The existence of the Higgs bosons has to do with the question of why the components of matter, and thus basically all of the physical objects in the world, have a mass in the first place. After all, some particles have no mass, such as light particles and, perhaps, neutrinos (see ►Puzzle). The ►standard model of physics explains the mass of particles in terms of the Higgs field. This energy field is of infinite extension and evenly distributed throughout the entire universe. Only through interacting with the Higgs field do elementary particles receive their masses. But how does this mechanism work?

The Angelina Field

Imagine a typical cocktail party. The guests are standing together chatting in small groups evenly distributed about the room. Suddenly the door opens and Angelina Jolie enters. As she passes through the room, guests in her vicinity assemble around her but redistribute themselves once she has passed by. In this way, an ever-changing crowd of people accompanies Angelina through the room. This dynamic cluster of people around her substantially increases Angelina's mass inside the party room; accordingly, she needs much longer to stop or accelerate her passage. In other words, Angelina causes a local disturbance in the distribution of guests and thereby increases her own mass.

In much the same way, heavy particles cause a local disturbance of the Higgs field, thereby creating a curvature in their surrounding space and generating accelerating forces as well as mutual attraction. How can we verify this theory? We cannot directly measure the Higgs field, since it must have the same force everywhere; otherwise we world have different masses in different regions of the universe. However, every field of force has exchange particles, so-called ►bosons, that mediate the field's interaction with other particles. The bosons of the electromagnetic field, for example, are photons (light particles). And the bosons of the Higgs field are Higgs bosons.

Now the question is how to generate and verify such Higgs bosons in order to confirm the theory of the Higgs field and to investigate the cause of particle masses more thoroughly. Unfortunately, the theory predicts that Higgs bosons are extraordinarily heavy — about two hundred times heavier than a hydrogen atom. For this reason, we would need enormous amounts of energy to generate a Higgs boson. Although indirect evidence of the existence of this kind of boson exists in the form of various traces resulting from experiments in particle accelerators, as of this writing there has been no direct confirmation. The hitherto negative search results can be explained by the fact that the Higgs boson's mass must amount to more than 115,000 MeV. Among the other high hopes physicists have for the new LHC particle accelerator to be launched in mid-2008 is that it will advance the search for the Higgs bosons.

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