boson

[′bō‚sän]

(statistical mechanics)

A particle that obeys Bose-Einstein statistics; includes photons, pi mesons, and all nuclei having an even number of particles and all particles with integer spin.

Higgs boson

The most elementary atomic particle discovered to date at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. With 99.9% certainty, the Higgs is said to be the particle that gives all other particles mass. It is smaller than all other particles but also heavier in atomic weight. Considered the glue of the universe, the Higgs is an invisible energy field that fills space.

The Higgs Is a Type of Boson
Named after Satyendra Nath Bose, a boson is a particle that shares quantum states and behaves collectively; for example, a photon is a boson. The Higgs is a type of boson that was postulated by three scientists in the 1960s: Peter Higgs, Francois Englert and Tom Kibble, all of whom were present in Geneva in 2012 when the discovery was officially announced. See quantum state and particle accelerator.

The God Particle

Higgs is also called the "God Particle" after Leon Lederman's book, written two decades before it was finally observed. The book takes you through 2,500 years of physics with a sense of humor and an uncanny way of really teaching the subject.

quantum state

A fundamental attribute of particles according to quantum mechanics. The quantum states are primarily x-y-z position, momentum, angular momentum, energy, spin and time.

Fermions
The shell structures of the atom are made up of fermion particles, which include the protons and neutrons in the nucleus and the electrons in the outer orbits. Fermions cannot share the same quantum state variables. For example, every electron traveling in electric current has a different quantum state than the electron next to it. The fermion was named after Italian physicist Enrico Fermi (1901-1954).

Bosons
Bosons are particles that can be in the same quantum state. Photons are examples of bosons, and lasers, masers and the superfluidity Helium derive their behavior as a result. The boson, pronounced "bow-son," was named after Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose (1894-1974). See quantum mechanics, electron, photon and Higgs boson.

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The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Boson

bose particle, a particle with zero or integral spin. Bosons obey Bose-Einstein statistics (hence the designation of the particle). Bosons include light quanta, or photons (spin 1); quanta of the gravitational field (if such exist), or gravi-tons (spin 2); unstable elementary particles such as mesons and boson resonances; and also compound particles made up of an even number of fermions (particles of half-integral spin)—for example, atomic nuclei with an even total number of protons and neutrons (a deuteron, a ⁴He nucleus or alpha particle, and so on); and gas molecules. Bosons are also quasi-particles of integral (or zero) spin—for example, pho-nons in the solid state and in liquid ⁴He and excitons in semiconductors and dielectrics.

V. P. PAVLOV

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References in periodicals archive

The right-handed neutrino dark matter can communicate with the SM particles through (i) the [Z'.sub.B-L] boson and (ii) two Higgs bosons which are realized as linear combinations of the SM Higgs and the B-L Higgs bosons.

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"This experience has influenced my entire academic career, including my current research on the recently unveiled Higgs boson, whose existence was theorised in the 1960s by Professor Peter Higgs, an honorary fellow of Swansea University, in one of the most spectacular triumphs of logic and intuition that resulted in the award of a Nobel Prize in 2013.

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Theoretical physicists began to calculate the processes of birth and decay of this boson, and experimental physicists began to search for it in nuclear reaction products at all the largest colliders in the world (for example, in Europe at the electron-positron LEP accelerator with energy up to 104 GeV at CERN and in the USA at a giant proton-antiproton accelerator <<Tevatron>> with an energy of up to 1 TeV at the E.

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It was in 2013 he got the Nobel prize for physics which he shared with Francois Englert of the Free University of Brussels who had independently come up with a model explaining why particles are not massless and this model requires the existence of the Higgs boson.

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In particular, scientists are searching for a Higgs boson produced alongside two top quarks.

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So, the ATLAS team, while experimental search for heavy resonances of a mass in the scale from 1 to 3.5 TeV decaying into a pair of bosons (i.e., into WW-, WZ-, or ZZ-pairs), discovered an anomalous number of events having an invariant mass of ~ 2 TeV.

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I wonder if targeting the Higgs bosons that attach to my energy might be an easy way to lose weight, but -- more importantly -- I marvel at what this discovery reveals about the mystery of God's world.

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One theory that could be tested suggests that the Higgs boson can give birth to particles of dark matter.

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