Paparazzi picture of Higgs Boson.
Alternative title: day Charlie Sheen would call a win.
So when they say interact with the Higgs field, what is the effect on the field?
Is it uniformly distributed normally, but is distorted momentarily under acceleration?
If I could see the Higgs field, would it look different around me as to around a neutron star?
Standard disclaimer of “sorry if these are dumb questions” etc
I suppose you have to take the good science reporting with the bad, but… sigh.
In particular, the picture that “shows” a Higgs boson decaying, with the caption “Breakthrough!” is:
(1) …not copyright “livejournal.com”. That picture is from LHC collaborators. I assume the Daily Mail just copied it from livejournal.com.
(2) …not actually a real event! It has nothing to do with the current rumors. It is a simulation from ages ago of what a particular type of Higgs boson decay might look like. It’s not even the same type of decay that the rumored measurement used.
As long as I’m talking about the images…
The “Discovery:” image caption makes no sense. CDF is not “currently home to particle accelerator Tevatron”. The picture whose caption begins “Pictured: The accelerator tunnel of the Tevatron” is not a picture of the accelerator tunnel of the Tevatron. It is a picture of the CDF detector. And, for “Nerve centre:” – no one in that room has done any analysis of any, er…, “bump data”. That’s the lab’s main operations control room. They are the accelerator experts who keep the particles flowing 24/7. They don’t do particles physics analysis. The analyses are handled by the experimenters elsewhere on site or around the globe, and (for the most part) these physicists would just get in the way if they were in the main control room.
Minor nitpick: That picture says “livescience.com”, not “livejournal.com”. Daily Mail isn’t good science reporting, but it’s not quite that bad.
Ha! Right… I guess my mind mapped the domain name onto what I had heard of before, which is the latter and not the former.
Continuous interaction with the Higgs field is an imperfect analogy, but one that is used a lot. The endowment of mass isn’t a dynamical thing, and there are no field excitations occurring anywhere to “create” the mass.
Much more mundanely, rather, the Higgs having a vacuum expectation value and a coupling with the electron (say) just means that the electron field itself ends up with an extra term in the kinetic portion of the equations governing its behavior. Namely, after electroweak symmetry break, the expressions underlying the Standard Model end up with the Higgs vacuum expectation value (call it v, to be thought of now as just some constant) all over the place. Among the places v appears is in the particle propagation terms, exactly where a mass would be. And… done.
In other words, the particle gains mass not because of on-going dynamics but rather right at the time of spontaneous symmetry breaking. (Particle masses end up different from each other due to different coupling strengths between the Higgs and the various particles. Indeed, v shows up in each of the newly generated mass terms always multiplied by a particle-specific coupling constant.)
Since Pasta has excellently covered the thread’s main question, I’ll just mention that this is commonly referred to as Le Sage gravity, and the problem with it Chronos probably had trouble recalling is that, since matter can’t be perfectly transparent to the radiation causing the gravitational interaction, one can use it to shield against gravitational effects – which for instance implies that addition of matter to some object does not result in a proportional increase of the object’s gravitation. One can of course always consider these effects so small as to be undetectable, but any form of gravitational shielding is incompatible with the equivalence principle and hence, general relativity.
Ok, so particles somehow obtain inertial mass from the Higgs Field messing with their electroweak symetry. Is the HB the result of that interaction? It sounds like HBs are assumed to exist because something is leftover after that interaction. And are the HBs not always created by these interactions? Is that why they’re not all over the place to detect?
Higgs Bosons generally don’t exist? The FIELD that allows their creation exists (everywhere). Get a high energy event going and a Higgs will pop into existence DUE to the field. Its really not the Higgs we are excited about, it that if we can create one, then the field likely exists and that field is what explains “mass”.
Is that right?
Pretty much. Introducing the causality (“due to the field”) might be a bit strong, depending on what you mean. As soon as one executes the required rearrangements to put the theory on its physical (broken symmetry) footing, the residual Higgs boson in the theory looks just like any other particle, and it can be created just like any other particle. So, to the extent that the creation of an electron in a collider isn’t generally thought of as “the electron (particle) came out of the existing electron field”, so to is the creation of a Higgs boson not generally thought of that way. Rather: the fact that the pre-symmetry-breaking Higgs field has a non-zero vacuum expectation value just changes what the physical fields actually are, and among them must be at least one (physical) Higgs boson, along with whatever other particles. The magic about the Higgs field having a non-zero value everywhere in space is true, but it’s the preamble to the post-symmetry-breaking expressions, where the Higgs is just a work-a-day boson, and the weak interaction force carriers have mass, and the fermions also have mass (and interactions with the Higgs, among other things).
Further, just as making a tau lepton or a top quark was hard because they are so heavy, making a Higgs is hard because it is (apparently) heavier than what we’ve been able to achieve so far.
(There’s making a Higgs in a collider, but then there’s also detecting it. The latter is of varying difficulty depending on the mass of the Higgs. That is, once you make it, it has to decay into identifiable products. Which products are energetically accessible depends on the Higgs boson’s mass, and some sets of products are more difficult to pick out of the haystack than others.)
The above is meant to address TriPolar’s post, too.
Does the importance of the Higgs field at low energy involve virtual Higgs bosons?
Pretty much, with one additional quibble: Real Higgs bosons generally don’t exist. But virtual Higgses are all over the place, just like virtual anything else.
Thanks for taking the time to answer my post. 
I was thinking that virtual particles are a part of structure of space itself. I guess you would call it a guage field (???) if I have understood some of the wonderful posts here. Since an atom is almost entirely empty space, displacement of the field would only be partial. You would have greater displacement with greater density. In that case wouldn’t the addition of mass cause additional displacement?
Since that probably wasn’t clear, what I meant was that the density of the field would be greatest in areas where there is little or no mass and less in areas where mass is concentrated. So the field would still be present everywhere. Only the density would change.
If that is how things work (unlikely, I know), then the Casimir effect should be slightly less pronounced in orbit that on the earth at sea level.
However, I don’t think any of this would explain the virtually infinite reach of gravity. I’m sure there would be other problems too.
wanted to
ETA: Oh thanks to Chronos, half and half and pasta for some very enlightening post.
Yes, thanks to Chronos, Pasta, HMHW, et al. It is the Higgs Field which confers the mass, and the Higgs Boson doesn’t have to exist in real form. Finding one simply proves that a Higgs Field behaves according to predictions and can form a particle.
Ok, next turtle. What’s so mysterious about it then? The particle doesn’t have to exist. Creating one is difficult, and then detecting it even more difficult, but not impossible. So why the hype? Apparently someone even theorized that HBs travel back in time to avoid detection (I didn’t follow the link, maybe all nonsense). Is there some mysterious quality of the HB that sets it apart from other particles, or is this just climbing Everest or reaching the Pole.
It does have to exist, if the whole electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism is correct. If we don’t find the Higgs boson, then a central core of the Standard Model has to be ejected. That’s why it’s a big deal.
OT: what do I have to do to upgrade from the standard model to the deluxe model. Just curious. 
Careful they don’t string you along.
Sorry, I meant that real particles don’t have to exist for the mass to be conferred to other particles. But is that incorrect?
And do we have a reason to believe they might not exist? The explanations provided here make it sound like detecting a Higgs Boson would be difficult, not that they haven’t shown up where expected.
I’m not sure I understand your statement. Which real particles don’t have to exist for whose mass to be conferred onto which other particles?
It is difficult to create and detect a Higgs, but we know exactly how difficult, in a quantitative way. Thus, we can make robust predictions like: “If the Higgs boson has a mass of 88 GeV/c[sup]2[/sup], then in this data sample and with these analysis techniques, we should observe 192 +/- 40 Higgs bosons.” (Getting to such a prediction is a major part of the effort, requiring an understanding of the underlying physics, the precise behavior of the detector elements, and the effects of the particular search/analysis techniques. This takes hundreds of person-years.)
Then, we look. If we see nothing, then we have demonstrated (in this example, to a confidence level of 4.8[symbol]s[/symbol], or 99.99984%) that there is no Higgs boson with a mass of 88 GeV/c[sup]2[/sup].
Since the difficulty of creation and detection depends on the assumed Higgs mass, we exclude larger and larger mass ranges (through improved equipment [e.g., LHC], data sample sizes, and analysis techniques, generally in that order of importance) until (a) we find it, or (b) we’ve excluded all possible masses. At the moment, there is plenty of mass range still available, but the LHC can access all of it, once sufficient data has been collected. (This will include along the way an energy upgrade for the machine.)