3 ms·

This is a great article. One thing I don't understand: the author says: > If you want to create something heavy like the Higgs boson, you have to hit the > H

This is a great article. One thing I don't understand: the author says: > If you want to create something heavy like the Higgs boson, you have to hit the > Higgs field with a sufficiently large (and sufficiently concentrated) burst of > energy to give the field the necessary one quantum of energy.) So when the LHC creates a spike of energy at a point large enough to create a Higgs boson, why does that energy interact with the Higgs field and get "used up" by other fields? In other words, if Higgs requires 100 units of energy and electrons require 1, why do we get 1 Higgs boson and not 100 electrons?

danbruc 11y ago
Not a physicist, but that actually happens. Depending on the coupling strengths between the various kinds of particles respectively fields and the amount of energy they have, different particles get created with different probabilities. That is why the Higgs is so hard to detect - for every Higgs you produce billions and billions of other particles that are easy to create and you have to look for the one Higgs in all this mess. Physicists calculate the expected amounts of other particles with incredible precision, subtract that from the experimental results and if they are successful they end up with a tiny amount of unexplained stuff.
xlm1717 11y ago
When particles are created in the LHC, a huge number of particles are created when particles are collided. This is why physicists have to sift through mountains of data to find the one higgs boson in the flood of every other particle.
danparsonson 11y ago
In addition to the fine answers already posted, it's also worth noting that it's not the Higgs itself that is detected but rather the decay products - shortly after production, the Higgs boson decays in one of a finite number of different ways, with associated probabilities, and this is what the scientists look for in the (presumably vast) data.

danbruc 11y ago

Not a physicist, but that actually happens. Depending on the coupling strengths between the various kinds of particles respectively fields and the amount of energy they have, different particles get created with different probabilities. That is why the Higgs is so hard to detect - for every Higgs you produce billions and billions of other particles that are easy to create and you have to look for the one Higgs in all this mess. Physicists calculate the expected amounts of other particles with incredible precision, subtract that from the experimental results and if they are successful they end up with a tiny amount of unexplained stuff.

xlm1717 11y ago

When particles are created in the LHC, a huge number of particles are created when particles are collided. This is why physicists have to sift through mountains of data to find the one higgs boson in the flood of every other particle.

danparsonson 11y ago

In addition to the fine answers already posted, it's also worth noting that it's not the Higgs itself that is detected but rather the decay products - shortly after production, the Higgs boson decays in one of a finite number of different ways, with associated probabilities, and this is what the scientists look for in the (presumably vast) data.