This geocache series was placed on occasion of the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson. We want to show you the beautiful countryside around the CERN Meyrin site and tell the story of this discovery with this Geocache series containing of five traditionals.
Each Geocache is dedicated to a particular aspect of the 50-year long scientific journey. The following Caches belong to this series:
The topic of this geocache is:
What is the Higgs boson? A (very) brief history of the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism
- The Standard Model of Particle Physics is a theory which describes and models how particles interact with each other and what the world is made up of on a very fundamental level.
- At the beginning of the 1960s, the theory described very well what was observed in the experiments, but it had one fundamental flaw: It does not explain why particles have masses while the particles observed in the experiments definitely had masses.
- In 1964 a mechanism was proposed by three independent groups which solved this issue.
- This mechanism was based on a similar principle than which was used several years before to explain why some materials lose their electric resistance below a certain temperature (an effect known as superconductivity).
- Basically, the mechanism describes how certain particles (the so-called W- and Z-particles) obtain their mass by interacting with a field that permeates the whole space.
- You can think of this field like a resistance to movement: Particles with no mass “feel” no resistance at all which is why they always move with the speed of light and the heavier a particle is the more resistance against movement it “feels”. This field which is everywhere is called “Brout-Englert-Higgs field”, or short BEH field, named after the physicists who came up with the idea.
- The Higgs particle is an “excitation” of the BEH field. You can think of it as a water wave which is excited by a pebble thrown into a pond.
- This particle was predicted as being a prove for the existence of the BEH field. The investigation of the Higgs particle is our only possibility to investigate the BEH field, just like the investigation of how water waves spread on the pond is a possibility to investigate properties of the water from afar.
If you want to know more about the history of the Higgs boson, you can learn more on the CERN website..