![]() This particle is the one missing piece of our present understanding of the laws of nature, known as the Standard Model. "Much of today's research in elementary particle physics focuses on the search for a particle called the Higgs boson. One of the main aims of particle physics over the next couple of decades is to prove once and for all the existence or nonexistence of the Higgs boson."Īnother, more extensive response comes from Howard Haber and Michael Dine, both of whom are professors of physics at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics at the University of California at Santa Cruz: We have not yet truly proved that the Higgs boson exists, however. In other words, if we assume that the Higgs boson exists, we can infer its mass based on the effect it would have on the properties of other particles and fields. We can even take all our data on particle physics data and interpret them in terms of the mass of a hypothetical Higgs boson. "Because the Higgs field would be responsible for mass, the very fact that the fundamental particles do have mass is regarded by many physicists as an indication of the existence of the Higgs field. The particle associated with the Higgs field is called the Higgs boson. As a consequence of wave-particle duality, all quantum fields have a fundamental particle associated with them. One major ingredient in this model is a hypothetical, ubiquitous quantum field that is supposed to be responsible for giving particles their masses (this field would answer the basic question of why particles have the masses they do-or indeed, why they have any mass at all). "Over the past few decades, particle physicists have developed an elegant theoretical model (the Standard Model) that gives a framework for our current understanding of the fundamental particles and forces of nature. Stephen Reucroft in the Elementary Particle Physics group at Northeastern University gives this introductory reply:
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