Naked Universe of Ana
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Higgs boson, Massless particles and my ass here
🕑 Added 2025-03-13 20:47:45 +0000 UTCI've decided to share a little story about the evolution of the Universe—more specifically, about the Higgs boson and why it’s so important. The Universe evolved incredibly fast, and all the crucial stuff happened in literally less than a second. In other words, it was like preparing the soil. First, the particles we know (well, maybe not all of you are super familiar with them, haha) appeared. But… these guys were massless. Yeah, it sounds weird, but that’s how it was. They existed, if you will, as clumps of energy—like, say, the photon. And then the Higgs showed up… the so-called Higgs field began to act. Thanks to it, particles started “sticking” to space and acquiring mass. This allowed atoms, molecules, stars, and galaxies—the stuff we see today—to form.
Now, let’s talk about the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. In my opinion, the main motivation for building it was basically the search for the Higgs. So, what goes on there? Roughly speaking, protons are accelerated to insane speeds and smashed into each other countless times, creating conditions similar to those right after the Big Bang.
Higgs’ fingerprints:
The Higgs boson is extremely unstable and decays very quickly, and it doesn’t show up in every event. Physicists looked for its characteristic “fingerprints” in the debris—for example, when it decays into 4 leptons (that is, electrons or muons, more or less). The formula goes like this:
pp→H→ZZ→4L
I’ll have to shoot a video with the Higgs diagram once Instagram unblocks me. It also decays into photons. It’s a ton of work and a massive amount of data to process—gathering and crunching all the channels is fucking madness, to put it bluntly.
In 2012, the analysis of data from ATLAS (and the other detector, CMS) showed that the observed signals matched exactly what the theory predicted. In the article’s figure, you can see a blue bump—that’s the Higgs. You can notice how it stands out against the red (the prediction). In physics, there’s this notion of standard deviations (i.e., the deviation from expectations if the Higgs were not present). If it’s 5σ or more, that’s considered a scientific discovery. Of course, you can’t directly see that on the graph—it has to be calculated manually and summed over not just this decay channel, but all of them. But the article’s description mentions it, for anyone reading and not understanding. Although, man, a lot of it is still confusing, haha.
And now the question:
if the Higgs gives mass to the particles,
who gives mass to the Higgs?
Right, only the Lord God can do that.
Checkmate, my little physicists.
Comments
Luis Ruiz Santiago
Putting the ass in mass 👀 Also, my understanding is that the Higgs field is what gives particles their mass, wouldn't that include the Higgs boson?
