Zipp explains the physics of the Higgs mechanism · 12:01pm Jul 10th, 2022
High up in the Brighthouse cupola, Zipp, Sunny, Izzy and Pipp stood bathed in the rainbow light field surrounding the unity crystals.
“A field, in physics, is a property of space,” said Zipp. “It’s something that can be all around us even if we can’t sense it. There’s a magnetic field around the Earth, but you need a compass to see it. The Higgs field, or more fully, the Brout-Englert-Higgs or BEH field, is everywhere in space. It doesn’t have a source in the way that the Earth is a source of its magnetic field. It has a non-zero value everywhere in the universe. Particles acquire mass by interacting with the Higgs field. Light particles, like neutrinos, don’t interact with the Higgs field very much. Particles which interact with it a lot have a bigger mass, and they need a bigger push to get them moving. This theory predicts the Higgs boson.”
“What is a Higgs Boson?” asked Sunny.
“It’s an excitation in the Higgs field,” said Zipp. Noting Sunny’s puzzled face she added, “Every particle is an excitation of a quantum field according to Quantum Field Theory. Just like photons are excited states of the electromagnetic field.”
Sunny remained puzzled.
“There’s an analogy to explain it,” said Zipp. “Suppose Pipp tries to trot through a room full of Pippsqueaks.”
“I think I like this analogy,” said Pipp.
“As she tries to cross the room, all the Pippsqueaks are attracted to her and form a cluster around her so she acquires a greater mass and it takes a force to change her momentum. In the same way, when an electron moves through a crystal, it acquires a bigger effective mass as it attracts the atoms around it; and when a particle moves through the Higgs field, it acquires mass.”
“And what about the Higgs boson,” asked Sunny.
Zipp smiled. “Now, suppose Pipp isn’t in the room, but somepony else comes in and whispers to a Pippsqueak that after her Maretime Bay performance, Pipp was seen behind the stage kissing a yellow earth pony mare with a bow in her tail.”
Pipp’s mouth dropped open. “Who told that?”
“Did you?” said Izzy. “What was it like? Was she a good kisser?”
Zipp continued, “The first Pippsqueak who hears the story will want to tell their friends. They will then turn as pass it to their neighbours, who will crowd around not wanting to miss any details. A cluster of Pippsqueaks passes across the room as they share the tale with one another. With the Higgs field, this clustering is the Higgs boson. It gives mass to itself in the same way as to other particles. The theory of the Higgs mechanism was tested by searching for the Higgs boson, and when that was found, ten years ago this week. It was the evidence that the BEH field was there.”
Pipp looked mildly irritated but shook it off. “So how was the Higgs discovered?”
“Ooo – I can answer that!” said Izzy. “You take two beams of protons, accelerate them to a really high energy, and let them smash together, and search through the big pile of trash to find a Higgs boson.”
Zipp nodded. “Higgs bosons are produced in proton collisions by gluon fusion and other processes. The Higgs is a heavy particle and you need a twenty-seven-kilometre ring to accelerate the protons to a high enough energy to make one. They only exist for a very short time. In less than a billionth of a billionth of the second they decay into other particles—beauty quarks, W bosons, and other things. The challenge in searching for the Higgs boson was to identify a clear signature that a Higgs had been created, against the background of all the other particles produced when you collide two proton beams. That needs a very big detector, or two, able to record the tracks of particles coming out of the collision, measure their energy, and identify what’s there.”
“That’s amazing,” said Sunny. “What particle physics discoveries are coming next?”
“There’s a lot of on-going research,” said Zipp. “We want to measure the properties of the Higgs and see all the particles it can decay to. If we take precise measurements of the interaction between the Higgs and other particles, we can see if the Higgs interaction can fully explain their masses, or is there something else contributing. And we can use the Higgs to probe for new particles, as it interacts with every particle with mass, it could be the ideal tool to search for new physics, such as Dark Matter.”
Note: The cocktail party analogy of the Higgs mechanism has been told many times with many variations. The original is attributed to Prof. David Miller in 1993. As his target audience was a UK government minister, his tale involved the ex-Prime Minister walking into a room of political party workers.
Right now, thirty years later, I’m not sure that story involving our soon-to-be-ex-Prime Minster at a party would work so well. But maybe it could be used to illustrate some other principle of physics.
Would Dark Energy, being repulsive, be the equivalent of Negative Bubbles in the Higgs field? If the higgs Boson has to be involved in all forms of mass interactions, even negative and imaginary ones? Or woul the universe have a resting density of Higgs, and Dark Energy is a lower value of that density, like that created by the Cassimir Effect?
That's actually a good description of the Higgs field. I never quite got it before.
(I realise that since I'm not knee-deep in the maths, I don't actually get it now; but I feel a little closer as a layman.)
I'm still unclear on the relationship between inertial mass, which you describe here, and gravitational mass, and why they seem to be the same.
Sunny should be the one giving the lecture.
Also, the analogy isn't quite correct (though you no doubt already know this). Particles don't slow down because the Higgs field is applying any sort of force to them (that isn't how the mechanism works; it is neither a force nor force-producing)—so it's nothing like the electron moving through a sea of atoms example. It's the property that a particle gains from the Higgs interaction that causes it to be bradyonic and affects how that particle shapes spacetime in an inertial reference frame, which in turn affects how much energy it takes to accelerate the particle in that frame.
5671494
That's a wonderful question. Those are the same because they're fundamentally identical. See general relativity for why, as Einstein is the one who figured this out. (Hint: it has to do with the curvature of spacetime, as implied by my previous comment in this thread.)
5671408
The Higgs mechanism isn't a force as Zipp's description implies, so it can't be a direct cause of dark energy. It could, however, also couple (in addition to how it couples to known excitations of other fields) to an as-yet-undiscovered field that is responsible.
I think this is an unlikely avenue for the explanation of dark energy. Our current best theory (which is very incomplete) is that a negative cosmological constant is responsible, but we don't know what controls that value, why it changes over time, or why it explicitly appears to match other values. So it's still worth exploring even if it isn't likely.
5671528
Theres something Ive seen which at first sight looks like it does intresting things, bt theres other basic things that seem to show its wrong, which is a pity. Given its works similar to how light and sound seem to behave so similarly in so many other ways, this is where you get Indicated air speed is not the same as indicated ground speed, especially if you measure according to Mach 1?
The weirdest thing to me is that at first sight, the Higgs effect is how I expected the Plank Mass to work.
5671526
So... what we see as inertia of matter is actually the effort needed to change the curvature of spacetime?
5671408
I recall at some point you suggested Dark Energy was Magic. That's probably just a good a way of putting it.
5671494
We'd all love to know why gravity works the way it does. Or at least, to say a bit more than because GR.
5671523
It's Zipp's turn. Sunny did the LHC.
Yes, all these analogies break down when you look closer.
5671536
You're close, I think. Think about the energy needed to push something out of a gravity well. Spacetime is curved in such a way that, in an inertial reference frame, accelerating out of that frame produces less motion because the worldlines for smaller velocities curve back toward the center of the well. This is also true for how a particle's gravity interacts with the particle itself, but since the well travels with the particle it doesn't inhibit motion (or perhaps more fundamentally, momentum)—it only inhibits changes to that motion.
5671543
GR explains gravity perfectly except at singularities and (presumably) in the quantum realm. Understanding GR is sufficient to understand the lack of difference between inertial and gravitational mass, so I don't think "because GR" is an incomplete explanation. You just need to fully understand GR for it to be complete.
5671408
Would Boris Johnson, being repulsive, be the equivalent of Negative Bubbles in a more current variation of the politician cocktail party analogy? Hard to imagine any ministers clustering around him, easy to imagine them spreading away from him.
5671543
My Little Cosmologist: Dark Energy is Magic!
5671549
If GR cant define precicely At a Singularity, then whats the smallest step, radius away from it Can it define, and if too that quantused step to be the minimum resolution possible, could you demonstrate quantum mechanics functions? That thing I saw years ago does like atoms and suggests singularities have a chance of being extremely negative energy, enough to force renormalisation?
5671543
And Dark Matter is Dust.
Sounds like we need to figure out how to make the Pippsqueak with the rumor into an equally-popular target as Pipp herself. Manifesting matter, booyeah!
5671605
A singularity is a functional discontinuity where an equation produces an absurd and obviously incorrect value. GR predicts that black holes have singularities and ringularities inside them where the equations for relativity produce infinitely large values that are obviously impossible. The Big Bang, as best we can determine with current physics, also began as a singularity: a field with infinite energy density. We call whatever these objects or effects actually are "singularities" as well, manely for convenience. The GR formulae work perfectly everywhere else.
It's important to note that singularities are zero-dimensional (and ringularities one-dimensional circles), so you have to be in exactly the right point in space to hit one. That may seem like less of a problem, except that a black hole singularity pulls everything into it, so you will reach that point in space in finite time. So in that case it can't be removed from the equation, which is a problem. String theory has one potential solution to this: the fundamental objects are one-dimensional strings, and singularities may be forced to appear in the center of a closed string loop. But nothing exists there, so it isn't a problem. (String theory is in fact a tremendously large number of theories in a vast parameter space, and the best version we have so far doesn't match the shape of our own Universe, so it hasn't yet proven useful in moving us toward a theory that would unite GR with quantum mechanics. However, it has produced some great math that is useful in other areas and continues to be an active avenue of research.)
5671717
I actually like the idea of ringularities in hyperbolic space, as in that case, they become the equivalent of the virtual focal point in a convex mirror. As in they have infinities, but it takes infinite energy to approach, you get pushed along the axis through the middle. This works even bettre if it turns out that spherical functions are unstable and collapse to hyperbolic for any value of rotation maybe?
Then again, if ringularities behaved as such, theyd be a candidate for density responsive repulsion similar to electrons around atoms?