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A giant of particle physics, Peter Wade Higgs, died at his home in Edinburgh on April 8, 2024, after turning 94 years old. His unparalleled legacy, epitomized by the discovery of the Higgs boson, continues to profoundly shape the future of particle physics like no other discovery before it. This is the story of his legacy.
When Higgs was born in 1929, our understanding of matter was completely different. Physicists had developed a simple model of matter with three fundamental or elementary particles (which cannot be broken down into smaller particles).
These were protons, which occur in the nuclei of atoms, electrons, which surround the protons and photons, packets of light responsible for a natural force called the electromagnetic force.
An astonishing revolution would unfold during Higgs' lifetime, culminating in the creation of the Standard Model of particle physics, the most successful framework for understanding the building blocks of the universe in history.
Higgs would be the heart of this theory. To understand the significance of Higgs' work, it is necessary to understand the puzzle that nature has presented for physicists, beginning with the discovery of the neutron in 1932.
The neutron is a subatomic particle, a neutral partner of the proton, but slightly heavier. When a neutron is ripped from the atomic nucleus, it decays into a proton and an electron in about ten minutes.
To explain this decay, a new force and a new particle to mediate it were required (known as a force carrier). The new force carrier had to be many times heavier than both the neutron and the proton, which the prevailing theory could not explain.
According to this theory, force carriers had to be massless. This was the case for the force carrier for the electromagnetic force, the photon. Physicists call this feature of the theory a symmetry.
In physics, theories with more symmetry have fewer free parameters - fewer parts of the theory that can be changed. An additional parameter, such as the mass of a force carrier, would make the theory inconsistent.
Physicists knew that some particles had mass, but could not explain it. They had to find the right way to break or overcome the symmetry in this theory, by giving particles mass in a way that was compatible with everything known about the laws of nature. When Higgs started working on his ideas in the 1960s, the question of how elementary particles acquired mass was a central issue in physics.
In the early 1960s, American physicist Phil Anderson noted that the problematic symmetry in this theory could be overcome in superconductors (a material that conducts electricity without resistance) or in charged gas called plasma. However, for a theory that is supposed to explain mass, a feasible solution cannot depend on a specific medium or material.
Later, Higgs and other theorists developed a model that overcame this difficulty. The other physicists were Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen, Tom Kibble, Robert Brout and François Englert. Englert would share the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics with Higgs.
In retrospect, the idea was simple: a background field permeates the entire space, creating the kind of medium that Anderson's idea worked for. Higgs published his first article on this subject in 1964. In 1966 he was the first to predict that this 'Higgs field' must also contain a 'Higgs boson'. If discovered, it would prove that the Standard Model was a consistent theory of nature.
Yet the search for the Higgs boson proved extremely challenging. Higgs himself thought the issue would not be resolved in his lifetime. It took almost 50 years and the largest experiment ever built, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, to finally discover the Higgs boson. On July 4, 2012, images of Higgs, moved to tears by the announcement, went around the world.
Our universe is fundamentally shaped by the unique properties of the Higgs boson. Like the solid, liquid, and gaseous states of matter, the Higgs field corresponds to a phase of the universe that can be determined by measuring the way the Higgs boson interacts with other particles.
In the decade since the discovery, many of these interactions have been observed at the LHC. These results have raised new questions. The stability of the universe - its ability to remain in its current state more or less forever - appears to depend on the mass and interactions of the Higgs boson.
If the current measurements of that particle are correct, the universe is not stable in its current state. This means that it could eventually undergo a transition to another form. The answers we discover to this question could prove the Standard Model wrong.
Physicists also want to answer whether the Higgs field really explains all the masses of elementary particles, as predicted by the Standard Model. For many Higgs bosons produced at the LHC, we cannot figure out what other particles they decay into. If we could do that, we could test more speculative theories related to dark matter or other theories that go beyond the Standard Model.
To answer these questions, Europe, the US and China have proposed plans to build new particle accelerators aimed at studying the Higgs boson. Higgs' legacy will be the experimental particle physics program of the 21st century.
Higgs was a physicist from another era. It would now be unthinkable that someone with his publication record would stick around in academia. He published only a handful of articles, almost all of which were written by him alone. Today's academic culture creates intense competition and pressure to publish regularly.
Higgs acknowledged this in a 2013 interview: "It is difficult to imagine how in today's climate I would ever have enough peace and quiet to do what I did in 1964... Today I wouldn't get an academic job... I wouldn't. I think I would be considered productive enough."
This should be taken as a warning. Breakthroughs require time to read and study work in other areas, such as the time Higgs spent understanding Anderson's work. They require universities to create an environment that prioritizes time for research, rather than placing researchers in precarious positions dependent on the constant pursuit of grant funding.
It would be entirely appropriate if the legacy of Peter Higgs, who transformed our understanding of particle physics, also transformed our approach to research.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
