Peter Higgs

Physicist who predicted boson that explains why particles have mass

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Theoretical physicist saw his eponymous particle discovered after 48 years

Portrait of Peter Higgs

During a few weeks in the summer of 1964, Peter Higgs, a theoretical physicist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, wrote two short papers outlining his ideas for a mechanism that could give mass to fundamental particles, the building blocks of the Universe. His aim was to rescue a theory that was mathematically appealing but ultimately unrealistic because the particles it described had no mass. The second paper drew attention to a measurable consequence of his proposal — it predicted the existence of a new massive particle. Nearly half a century later, the discovery of the predicted particle brought Higgs, who has died aged 94, a share of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The mechanism Higgs described became a key component of the standard model of particle physics during the 1970s, but the associated particle remained stubbornly elusive. Then, in 2012, two giant experiments run by more than 6,000 physicists at CERN, Europe’s high-energy physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, discovered something with the appropriate properties. By then, the particle had achieved fame as the Higgs boson, although the self-effacing Higgs would usually refer to it as ‘the scalar boson’ in reference to its key characteristic of having no intrinsic spin.The ‘brazen’ science that paved the way for the Higgs boson (and a lot more)

Higgs was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1929, but his father’s work as a sound engineer for the BBC took the family to Bristol, where Higgs attended Cotham Grammar School. There, he spotted several mentions on the honours boards of a previous pupil, Paul Dirac, who had earned a share of the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in quantum mechanics. Inspired, Higgs took up physics at King’s College London, where he obtained a PhD in 1954.

As a hitch-hiking student, Higgs had discovered a liking for Edinburgh, so in 1960 he was happy to be appointed as a lecturer there. He picked up on a long-standing interest in symmetry in subatomic particle physics, inspired in particular by the work of the future Nobel prizewinner Yoichiro Nambu, a Japanese American physicist then at the University of Chicago in Illinois. In physics, symmetry is linked to the conservation of quantities such as energy, momentum and electric charge. Working on a theory that had an underlying symmetry but in which particles had no mass, Nambu was attempting to generate mass through a mechanism known as spontaneous symmetry breaking. However, such symmetry breaking would also produce massless particles with zero spin, for which there was no evidence.Peter Higgs: the man behind the God particle

This seemed a dead end, but in 1964, Higgs realized that it was possible to get round the difficulty using gauge theory, which has the kind of symmetry found, for example, in the established theory of electromagnetism. Higgs showed that the massless particles associated with spontaneous symmetry breaking become ‘absorbed’ into massive particles. He published two short papers on this theme1,2, the second of which explicitly predicted a massive spin-zero particle. It fell to other physicists to realize that this mechanism for spontaneous symmetry breaking was key to a mathematically coherent gauge theory of particle physics that unites the electromagnetic interactions between particles with the weak interactions involved in certain forms of radioactivity. This Nobel-prizewinning ‘electro-weak theory’ became one of the twin pillars of the standard model of particle physics, and was well established by experiments by the 1990s.

The field had seemed something of a scientific backwater in the 1960s, but Higgs was not working alone. Two other papers were published in 1964 on the mechanism3,4, one appearing just before his own. But only Higgs drew attention to the associated massive spin‑zero particle, which in the 1970s began to be called the Higgs boson. The catchy name stuck.

Around this time, after his marriage broke down, Higgs found he was losing his way in theoretical particle physics. In addition to teaching, he became involved in the union side of university life and wrote few physics papers. Nevertheless, as appreciation of his work on spontaneous symmetry breaking grew, he was increasingly asked to give talks, a popular title being ‘My life as a boson’. He retired in 1996.The Higgs boson turns ten

The award of the Nobel prize to Higgs and Belgian physicist François Englert — the surviving author of the paper published just before Higgs’s in 1964 — came as little surprise to anyone, including Higgs, because it had been mooted since the 1980s. However, interest in the Higgs boson had increased over the years, not only among particle physicists but also among the general public and the media. It reached fever pitch after the construction of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, which was billed by many as the machine that would discover the last missing piece of the standard model. This intense interest brought fame at a level no one could have imagined in the 1960s, and the quiet physicist became a media star, before retiring for a second time when he reached 85.

A keen music lover, Higgs had little interest in the trappings of modern technology — he famously had no television and did not use the Internet. Yet he was far from being remote from the world. He had a strong social conscience and was a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Greenpeace at various times. Humble in many respects, with an infectious sense of humour, he was proud of the work that he had always known was important and which ultimately brought him fame.

Nature

Peter Higgs: I wouldn’t be productive enough for today’s academic system.

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Physicist doubts work like Higgs boson identification achievable now as academics are expected to ‘keep churning out papers’
  • Peter Higgs: 'Today I wouldn't get an academic job. It's as simple as that'.
Peter Higgs: ‘Today I wouldn’t get an academic job. It’s as simple as that’. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

Peter Higgs, the British physicist who gave his name to the Higgs boson, believes no university would employ him in today’s academic system because he would not be considered “productive” enough.

The emeritus professor at Edinburgh University, who says he has never sent an email, browsed the internet or even made a mobile phone call, published fewer than 10 papers after his groundbreaking work, which identified the mechanism by which subatomic material acquires mass, was published in 1964.

He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today’s academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: “It’s difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964.”

Speaking to the Guardian en route to Stockholm to receive the 2013 Nobel prize for science, Higgs, 84, said he would almost certainly have been sacked had he not been nominated for the Nobel in 1980.

Edinburgh University’s authorities then took the view, he later learned, that he “might get a Nobel prize – and if he doesn’t we can always get rid of him”.

Higgs said he became “an embarrassment to the department when they did research assessment exercises”. A message would go around the department saying: “Please give a list of your recent publications.” Higgs said: “I would send back a statement: ‘None.’ ”

By the time he retired in 1996, he was uncomfortable with the new academic culture. “After I retired it was quite a long time before I went back to my department. I thought I was well out of it. It wasn’t my way of doing things any more. Today I wouldn’t get an academic job. It’s as simple as that. I don’t think I would be regarded as productive enough.”

Higgs revealed that his career had also been jeopardised by his disagreements in the 1960s and 70s with the then principal, Michael Swann, who went on to chair the BBC. Higgs objected to Swann’s handling of student protests and to the university’s shareholdings in South African companies during the apartheid regime. “[Swann] didn’t understand the issues, and denounced the student leaders.”

He regrets that the particle he identified in 1964 became known as the “God particle”.

He said: “Some people get confused between the science and the theology. They claim that what happened at Cern proves the existence of God.”

An atheist since the age of 10, he fears the nickname “reinforces confused thinking in the heads of people who are already thinking in a confused way. If they believe that story about creation in seven days, are they being intelligent?”

He also revealed that he turned down a knighthood in 1999. “I’m rather cynical about the way the honours system is used, frankly. A whole lot of the honours system is used for political purposes by the government in power.”

He has not yet decided which way he will vote in the referendum onScottish independence. “My attitude would depend a little bit on how much progress the lunatic right of the Conservative party makes in trying to get us out of Europe. If the UK were threatening to withdraw from Europe, I would certainly want Scotland to be out of that.”

He has never been tempted to buy a television, but was persuaded to watch The Big Bang Theory last year, and said he wasn’t impressed.

 

The Particle at the End of the Universe.

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The difficulty of trying to explain the hunt for the Higgs boson shows that nature will not be so easily defined.
The Large Hadron Collider at Cern probably has another 20 years of use and further glories can be anticipated.

In the early 80s, the US decided to build a massive particle accelerator which was called – with typical American excess – the Superconducting Super Collider. During its early planning stages, the great machine was enthusiastically supported by the vast majority of US congressmen who each hoped the $4.4bn project would be based in his or her state, bringing jobs and prestige.

The Particle at the End of the Universe, by Sean Carroll The Particle at the End of the Universe: The Hunt for the Higgs and the Discovery of a New World, by Sean Carroll

Texas was eventually selected to be the SCC’s home – at Waxahachie, near Dallas. Forty-nine out of the 50 state delegations in Congress promptly dropped their interest in the SSC, leaving it fighting for its life. The Nobel laureate (and SCC defender) Steven Weinberg subsequently appeared on radio with a congressman who wanted to stop the project. “I explained that the collider was going to help us learn the laws of nature and asked if that didn’t deserve a high priority,” Weinberg recalls. “I remember every word of his answer. It was ‘No’.”

A few months later the SSC was cancelled and so Europe took over responsibility for the next-generation collider that physicists said they needed. The Large Hadron Collider – built at the laboratories of Cern, near Geneva – eventually began operations in 2009 when scientists started smashing beams of protons into each other to seek new sub-atomic entities in the debris. Three years later, they found the Higgs boson, the fabled particle responsible for giving mass to objects. Peter Higgs, a Brit, and the Belgian François Englert, who first proposed the particle’s existence, subsequently shared the 2013 Nobel prize for physics.

Crucially, the LHC probably has another 20 years of use and further glories can be anticipated – though Sean Carroll makes it clear that these are unlikely to bring wealth or vast industrial returns. We construct machines such as the LHC, and try to uncover the building blocks of the cosmos, primarily as cultural exercises, he argues in The Particle at the End of the Universe. “Basic science might not lead to immediate improvements in national defence or a cure for cancer but it enriches our lives by teaching us something about the universe of which were are a part,” he tells us. “That should be a very high priority indeed.”

It is a fair point though it begs the simple question: just what have we learned from the billions of euros we have invested in particle physics? What cultural benefits have they brought? A great deal, says Carroll. We now know that sub-atomic particles come in two varieties: fermions that make up matter, and bosons that carry forces. The latter include gluons, photons, gravitons (which carry gravity) and of course the Higgs. The former, the fermions, include leptons such as the electron and quarks of which there are six types: up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom. On top of that we have issues of symmetry, force fields and wave functions.

And that, I am afraid to say, is just the start, for as Carroll makes abundantly and wearisomely clear, these particles, forces and processes combine in highly complex, intricate ways, often inducing numbing incomprehension in the process. “Whenever we have symmetry that allows us to do independent transformations at different points (a gauge symmetry), it automatically comes with a connection field that lets us compare what is going on at those locations,” we are told at one point. I confess the sentence makes no sense to me despite several readings. Nor is it the only chunk of Carroll prose that left me reeling in bafflement.

To be fair to the author, he is dealing with a subject of mind-spinning complexity. Things get messy, he admits. “It’s not supposed to be simple; we’re talking about a series of discoveries that resulted in multiple Nobel prizes,” he states.

It is a good point and Carroll does try to pace his book carefully – at least during the opening sections. New concepts are introduced with restraint and, by adopting a light, slightly gossipy style, he occasionally lightens the reader’s load. On the work of the experimentalists at Cern who strive day and night to drive their machines to the limits, he tells us that “occasionally they are allowed to visit their families, or see the sun, though such frivolities are kept to a minimum”. That perfectly captures the intense, massive collaboration – involving thousands of scientists – that was required to build and run the Large Hadron Collider.

Unfortunately, such levity makes only rare appearances in a book that is sadly disfigured by the over-weaning ambition, of an otherwise talented author, to write the definitive account of the laws of nature for the layman. The resulting confusion suggests such an account is simply not feasible. Nature will not be so easily defined, it seems.

NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS 2013.

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The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2013 to

François Englert 
Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

and

Peter W. Higgs
University of Edinburgh, UK

“for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider”

Here, at last!

François Englert and Peter W. Higgs are jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 for the theory of how particles acquire mass. In 1964, they proposed the theory independently of each other (Englert together with his now deceased colleague Robert Brout). In 2012, their ideas were confirmed by the discovery of a so called Higgs particle at the CERN laboratory outside Geneva in Switzerland..

The awarded theory is a central part of the Standard Model of particle physics that describes how the world is constructed. According to the Standard Model, everything, from flowers and people to stars and planets, consists of just a few building blocks: matter particles. These particles are governed by forces mediated by force particles that make sure everything works as it should.

The entire Standard Model also rests on the existence of a special kind of particle: the Higgs particle. This particle originates from an invisible field that fills up all space. Even when the universe seems empty this field is there. Without it, we would not exist, because it is from contact with the field that particles acquire mass. The theory proposed by Englert and Higgs describes this process.

On 4 July 2012, at the CERN laboratory for particle physics, the theory was confirmed by the discovery of a Higgs particle. CERN’s particle collider, LHC (Large Hadron Collider), is probably the largest and the most complex machine ever constructed by humans. Two research groups of some 3,000 scientists each, ATLAS and CMS, managed to extract the Higgs particle from billions of particle collisions in the LHC.

Even though it is a great achievement to have found the Higgs particle — the missing piece in the Standard Model puzzle — the Standard Model is not the final piece in the cosmic puzzle. One of the reasons for this is that the Standard Model treats certain particles, neutrinos, as being virtually massless, whereas recent studies show that they actually do have mass. Another reason is that the model only describes visible matter, which only accounts for one fifth of all matter in the cosmos. To find the mysterious dark matter is one of the objectives as scientists continue the chase of unknown particles at CERN.

The Higgs Boson And A ‘New Physics’ –”Could Make The Speed Of Light Possible”.

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god

Scientists hailed CERN’s confirmation of the Higgs Boson in July of 2012, speculating that it could one day make light speed travel possible by “un-massing” objects or allow huge items to be launched into space by “switching off” the Higgs. CERN scientist Albert de Roeck likened it to the discovery of electricity, when he said humanity could never have imagined its future applications.

CERN physicists hope that the “new physics” will provide a more straightforward explanation for the characteristics of the Higgs boson than that derived from the current Standard Model. This new physics is sorely needed to find solutions to a series of yet unresolved problems, as presently only the visible universe is explained, which constitutes just four percent of total matter.

“The Standard Model has no explanation for the so-called dark matter, so it does not describe the entire universe – there is a lot that remains to be understood,” says Dr. Volker Büscher ofJohannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU).

Scientists hailed CERN’s confirmation of the Higgs Boson in July of 2012, speculating that it could one day make light speed travel possible by “un-massing” objects or allow huge items to be launched into space by “switching off” the Higgs. CERN scientist Albert de Roeck likened it to the discovery of electricity, when he said humanity could never have imagined its future applications.

CERN physicists hope that the “new physics” will provide a more straightforward explanation for the characteristics of the Higgs boson than that derived from the current Standard Model. This new physics is sorely needed to find solutions to a series of yet unresolved problems, as presently only the visible universe is explained, which constitutes just four percent of total matter.

“The Standard Model has no explanation for the so-called dark matter, so it does not describe the entire universe – there is a lot that remains to be understood,” says Dr. Volker Büscher ofJohannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU).

The discovery of the long-sought Higgs boson, an elusive particle thought to help explain why matter has mass, was hailed as a huge moment for science by physicists. In July of 2012, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, announced the discovery of a new particle that could be the long sought-after Higgs boson. The particle has a mass of about 126 gigaelectron volts (GeV), roughly that of 126 protons.

The new evidence came from an enormously large volume of data that has been more than doubled since December 2011. According to CERN, the LHC collected more data in the months between April and June 2012 than in the whole of 2011. In addition, the efficiency has been improved to such an extent that it is now much easier to filter out Higgs-like events from the several hundred million particle collisions that occur every second.

The existence of the Higgs boson was predicted in 1964 and it is named after the British physicistPeter Higgs. It is the last piece of the puzzle that has been missing from the Standard Model of physics and its function is to give other elementary particles their mass. According to the theory, the so-called Higgs field extends throughout the entire universe. The mass of individual elementary particles is determined by the extent to which they interact with the Higgs bosons.

“The discovery of the Higgs boson represents a milestone in the exploration of the fundamental interactions of elementary particles,” said Professor Dr. Matthias Neubert, Professor for TheoreticalElementary Particle Physics and spokesman for the Cluster of Excellence PRISMA at JGU.

On the one hand, the Higgs particle is the last component missing from the Standard Model of particle physics. On the other hand, physicists are struggling to understand the detected mass of the Higgs boson. Using theory as it currently stands, the mass of the Higgs boson can only be explained as the result of a random fine-tuning of the physical constants of the universe at a level of accuracy of one in one quadrillion.

The Higgs helps explains how the world could be the way that it is in the first millionth of a second in the Big Bang.

Physicist Ray Volkas said “almost everybody” was hoping that, rather than fitting the so-called Standard Model of physics — a theory explaining how particles fit together in the Universe — the Higgs boson would prove to be “something a bit different”.

“If that was the case that would point to all sorts of new physics, physics that might have something to do with dark matter,” he said, referring to the hypothetical invisible matter thought to make up much of the universe.

It could be that the Higgs particle acts as a bridge between ordinary matter, which makes up atoms, and dark matter, which we know is a very important component of the universe.

“That would have really fantastic implications for understanding all of the matter in the universe, not just ordinary atoms,” he added. De Roeck said scrutinising the new particle and determining whether it supported something other than the Standard Model would be the next step for CERN scientists.

Definitive proof that it fit the Standard Model could take until 2015 when the LHC had more power and could harvest more data.

Instead, De Roeck was hoping it would be a “gateway or a portal to new physics, to new theories which are actually running nature” such as supersymmetry, which hypothesises that there are five different Higgs particles governing mass.

For the image at the top of the page, two teams of astronomers used data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes to map the distribution of dark matter in a galaxy cluster known as Abell 383, which is located about 2.3 billion light years from Earth. Not only were the researchers able to find where the dark matter lies in the two dimensions across the sky, they were also able to determine how the dark matter is distributed along the line of sight. Several lines of evidence indicate that there is about six times as much dark matter as “normal”, or baryonic, matter in the Universe. Understanding the nature of this mysterious matter is one of the outstanding problems in astrophysics.

Galaxy clusters are the largest gravitationally-bound structures in the universe, and play an important role in research on dark matter and cosmology, the study of the structure and evolution of the universe. The use of clusters as dark matter and cosmological probes hinges on scientists’ ability to use objects such as Abell 383 to accurately determine the three-dimensional structures and masses of clusters.