 Dr. Sushanta Dattagupta. Eminent physicist, former Director of S.N Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, former Director of IISER Kolkata, former Vice Chancellor of Viswa Bharati University. Peter Higgs (May 29, 1929 to April 8, 2024)Peter Higgs, a physicist born in Newcastle Upon Tyne, died two days ago at the age of 94. Six decades ago he had predicted the existence of a fundamental particle, the presence of which was crucial for the validity of the 'Standard Model' that unifies two basic forces of Nature: weak and electromagnetic. It took the world nearly five more decades before that elusive particle was detected at the large hadron collider (LHC) in the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN), Geneva -- much to the relief of the high energy community.
The particle that was discovered in Geneva is called the Higgs boson. Why is it a boson? The latter name was christened by Paul Dirac, in deference to Satyendra Nath Bose, who along with Albert Einstein, had come up with a new kind of counting called the Bose-Einstein statistics. The latter suggest that there exists a set of elementary particles, an unbounded number of which can be accommodated in a given quantum state. Additionally, bosons are entities that are endowed with an intrinsic spin which is an integral multiple of the Planck constant. It must however be pointed out that Bose's focus was on the light quantum or photon that has a spin of unity (multiplied by the Planck constant), as his attempt was to give a mathematical foundation to the Planck radiation formula. On the other hand, the Higgs boson has a spin zero, distinct from that of the photon, yet it falls under the general classification scheme of bosons. By a queer twist of events exacerbated by 'social media' -- much to the chagrin of religious fundamentalists, the Higgs boson had acquired the popular name of the 'God particle'. The root-cause for that name is attributed to the Nobel laureate experimental physicist Leon Lederman who, out of frustration for not being able to detect it, had dubbed it as 'that goddamn particle'! By all accounts, Higgs did not appreciate the nomenclature, just as he did not want it to be named after himself. Why is the Higgs boson so significant for the acquisition of mass by the particles of the universe? Because, at a basic level, the interactions of 'fields' are symmetrical and consequently, the corresponding excitations have zero mass, called the Goldstone modes. A simple illustration is that of a marble at the bottom of a wine bottle. Although there is a hump at the middle which the marble has to overcome in order to cross-over from one position across another, it can however find it facile to move around the bottom of the bottle without any change in energy. Now, energy in Einstein's relativity corresponds to mass -- hence the Goldstone modes or zero-energy excitations, carry no mass. But, if the symmetry is broken, i.e., the bottom of the bottle is warped, zero-energy exchanges give way to finite energy changes and hence generation of mass. That is why the Higgs mechanism is so critical for the so-called 'mass-renormalization'. One year after the Higgs boson was discovered in CERN, Peter Higgs was awarded the Nobel prize in physics, along with Francois Englert, in 2013.
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