• Question: what is the Higgs boson thingy?

    Asked by daisyh8ss to Yelong, Vicky, Oliver, Michele, Jackie on 11 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Michele Faucci Giannelli

      Michele Faucci Giannelli answered on 11 Mar 2015:


      The Higgs boson is a fundamental particle that arises from the existence of the Higgs field, a new type of field (a scalar field) which permeate the Universe. having discovered it, we have demonstrated the existence of such field which in turn explain how fundamental particles, like the electron, have a mass

    • Photo: Jaclyn Bell

      Jaclyn Bell answered on 13 Mar 2015:


      The Higgs boson is a particle which was thought up by Peter Higgs and 5 other scientists about 50 years ago to explain how certain particles have mass when others don’t. Something was giving them a mass and physicists couldn’t explain where this mass was coming from – So they made up a new particle – the Higgs boson. It decays almost immediately (turns into other particles and energy) and thats why it has been so hard for scientists to find it. We might only see one Higgs boson formed in billions of particle collisions in colliders which is why it was big news when scientists found it – and why Peter Higgs got the Nobel Prize 🙂

Comments