Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs
News
Nobel prize-winning physicist Peter Higgs, who proposed the existence of the so-called “God particle” that helped explain how matter formed after the Big Bang, has died at age 94.
Concept :
About Higgs Boson
- The Higgs boson imparts mass to elementary particles like electrons and quarks, being fundamental to the Higgs field.
- It is among the 17 elementary particles constituting the Standard Model of particle physics, the leading framework describing the universe’s fundamental constituents.
- The Higgs boson earns the nickname “God particle” for its pivotal role in subatomic physics. In 1964, Peter Higgs, François Englert, and others proposed to explain particle mass origins.
- July 4, 2012: Large Hadron Collider (LHC) scientists detected the Higgs boson, a pivotal milestone in particle physics.
Characteristics:
- The Higgs boson possesses a mass of 125 billion electron volts, approximately 130 times the mass of a proton.
- It exhibits zero charge and has zero spin, signifying a lack of quantum mechanical angular momentum.
- Remarkably, the Higgs boson is the sole elementary particle devoid of spin.
- Acting as a “force carrier” particle, it mediates interactions between particles, with bosons exchanged during these interactions.
