I recently saw the Nova episode Big Bang Machine, which covered the discovery of the Higgs particle by the LHC. It did this by smashing protons together and then analyzing the resulting debris. They theorized the Higgs would decay into two photons, and the LHC was able to confirm that. So does that mean that there is one less Higgs in the universe after the collision? Since the Higgs field gives particles their mass, will the loss of a Higgs weaken the field and, therefore, lessen the mass of matter?
Also, is the Higgs field uniform throughout the universe? Or are there places where it is more spread out and matter would have less mass in those areas?
Higgs particles do not usually exist, except in very strange situations, like those inside particle accelerators. When Higgs particles do come into existence, they naturally decay very quickly.
The Higgs field does exist, all the time and everywhere, and the particles that get their mass from Higgs interaction do so by interacting with the field directly, and those interactions do not involve any Higgs particles.
Higgs particles are a specific kind of excitation of the Higgs field. They are important experimentally because if the Higgs field exists, we should be able to excite it into making particles, and the properties of those particles (which are relatively easy to measure) tell us something about the properties of the field (which are harder to measure).
Basically the particles are important to us, but the field is whats important to the universe.
Could be my greatest life-guide and profound Life Affirmation, and probably is, were I equipped to follow the referents of what I will take up for now as my new guiding metaphor.
Don’t overplay your hand there Leo. The particles are easy(er) for us to measure. So they give us insight into what’s hidden below inside the field and beyond the reach of our current instruments.
Sorta like setting off some dynamite in a hole and measuring the reverberations to learn about the underground minerology with an eye to finding some oil. It’s easier than digging umpteen hundred test wells. And we don’t yet have magic Star Trek sensors sufficient to see the oil directly. So we whack the Earth in a sorta-calibrated fashion and try to make sense of what consequences we can detect.
The novelty of the LHC is that we just recently learned how to make a machine big enough (we hoped) to whack the Universe hard enough to make a Higgs particle (we hoped). When it showed up more or less on cue the people involved were very happy. That proved they’ve got some legit insight into the as-yet unseen nether regions.
And so: upwards and onwards to the *next *frontier!!
If the field exists everywhere, are there similarities to the “ether” they used to think was necessary for photon propigation? Remember the experiment where they sent light in perpendicular directions to see how the ether changed the speed of light? Could something be done in a similar manner with the Higgs field? Send a particle which has mass in different directions to see if has more mass in one direction than the other?
Only in the shallowest possible sense – that it is a field that exists everywhere.
The Higgs field (and other quantum fields) do not define an “at rest with respect to the field” reference frame, so there is no expected effect in a Michelson-Morley-type experiment.
It should also be noted that most bosons don’t even have a definite count. Different observers can validly disagree on the number of photons contained in a box, or gravitons, or gluons, or Higgses. So it’s not really meaningful to speak of “one less Higgs in the Universe”, or the like.
Also, not directly on point to the OP’s question, but worth mentioning: While the Higgs process is associated with the masses of some particles, most of the mass we’re familiar with (over 99%) comes from effects completely unrelated to the Higgs process.
Yep, this is where it is critical to remember E=MC^2
1 atom of hydrogen:
Total mass = ~1 GeV
Electromagnetic = ~ several eV
Electron and quarks, from the Higgs mechanism = ~20 MeV
The rest is from gluons/virtual quarks bound energy.
It is important to remember that how the parts are arranged has far more of an influence than the parts that make them up.
A neutron has significantly more mass than the individuals parts and an atom typically has less mass than those parts. Or to simplify E=mc^2 can be rewritten as m = E / c^2.
