This post is going to be a little different from the other posts on my page till now. I intend to provide a more theoretical insight into Higgs Physics. The post is still going to be very basic in terms of level of understanding, however it might require a bit of an expertise in basic linear algebra, group theory, intermediate level classical mechanics, special relativity and quantum mechanics. I intend to write a future blog on the Experimental Side of Higgs Physics too, but that is for another time. Without any further delay lets get started with our new journey of understanding the Higgs!

As I discussed in my past blog posts The Standard Model and Beyond, and What’s SUSY all about?, Higgs was the last piece of puzzle to be found that completed the Standard Model on the 4th of April,2012. But today, we are going to take a look what it actually means when we say things like: ‘The Higgs Field gives mass to all the fundamental particles’ or, ‘the Higgs boson, quanta of the Higgs Field has a mass of 124GeV due Higgs self coupling/interaction.’ on a theoretical ground. Although this post shall focus on the Higgs Field or the Higgs Boson, we are going to discuss in here about a lot of general stuff applicable for all other fermions/bosons in order to provide a basic understanding!

Prelude

The Standard Model comprises of fermions, the matter particles, and the bosons, the force carriers. Each boson in the standard model is known to provide some quantum number (kind of an identification number) to each of the fermions. the interaction with the gluon fields is what gives quarks theire color charge. Similarly the interaction with the photon field gives rise to electrical charge, and the interaction with the weak force fields (the W, and the Z boson fields) give rise to the weak isospin charge to all the fermions. But the standard model without the Higgs predicts that all the gauge bosons in the standard model should be massless. However it was found from the UA1 and UA2 experiments at CERN’s Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) in 1983 that infact the , and bosons do have large mass of around 91 GeV and 80GeV respectively. The puzzle was solved with the introduction of a new scalar field into the theory the Higgs Field, whose excitation gives rise to the Higgs boson. Perhaps there is question to why the fermions have mass, because the standard model for a different reason predicts that they should also be massless, and they are not. But that is a different question and we’ll come to that too eventually. So let’s get started!