The Higgs Boson

<p><strong>The Field Guide to Particle Physics <br></strong><a href="https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics">https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics</a><br>©2021 The Pasayten Institute <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">cc by-sa-4.0</a><br>The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: <a href="https://pdg.lbl.gov/">https://pdg.lbl.gov</a>.</p><p>The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! <a href="http://pasayten.org/heysean">Get in touch</a>.</p><p><strong>The Higgs Boson<br></strong><br>As far as we know, there is no other particle like the Higgs Boson, but there probably should be.</p><p><br>The Higgs is a difficult particle to describe because it almost always manifests in ways that don’t resemble particle behavior. The relationship between the <a href="https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics/photon">photon</a> and magnetic fields comes to mind. We sometimes call the Higgs’ amorphous presence the Higgs “field”.</p><p>Just as magnetic fields can permeate space, so too does the field of the Higgs. Unlike a magnetic field, which usually requires some physical source - like a collection of iron atoms in a refrigerator magnet or a spinning particle like the <a href="https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics/neutron">neutron</a> - the Higgs field is naturally always set to “on”.</p><p>Every once in a while, a disturbance in that field appears as a particle, the Higgs Boson.</p><p><br>When the Higgs does present as a particle, it’s fairly heavy. With a mass of 125 GeV, it’s one of the heaviest elementary particles around. Like many other heavy particles, the Higgs is unstable. It decays quickly, most often to a quark/antiquark pair, but has a lot of other options. It’s mean lifetime is somewhere near 0.0000000000000000000001 = 10^−22 seconds. That is much longer than the <a href="https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-ph