The Higgs Boson: Unlocking the Secrets of the Universe's Mass

The Higgs boson is a subatomic particle that was discovered in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. It is the quantum of the Higgs field, a fundamental field of the universe that is responsible for giving mass to elementary particles.

The Higgs boson is named after physicist Peter Higgs, who along with others, proposed its existence in 1964 as a way to explain why some particles have mass while others do not. The Higgs boson is the only fundamental scalar particle in the Standard Model of particle physics, and its discovery confirmed the existence of the Higgs field and completed the Standard Model.

The Higgs boson is a very heavy particle, with a mass of about 125 GeV (gigaelectronvolts), or about 133 times the mass of a proton. It decays quickly into other particles, and its discovery required the development of sophisticated detectors and analysis techniques to identify its signature in the collider experiments.

The Higgs boson has several unique properties that make it different from other subatomic particles. For example, it has a very large coupling to the top quark, which is one of the heaviest known fundamental particles. It also has a very small width, meaning that it decays very quickly into other particles.

Overall, the discovery of the Higgs boson was a major milestone in the history of physics, and it has opened up new areas of research into the nature of the universe and the fundamental forces that shape it.