Question on Higgs Boson

[foodchain]

If the higgs boson or mechanism is to give mass to various particles this does not include a photon right? Yet on collision cant photons of some value of energy produce particles that have mass? So that would mean the higgs boson would have had to appear at some point and decay into particles with mass right? Or is it something of a field effect? Simply put if photons are to mediate the electromagnetic field is it on interaction with such a field that you get a point like photon? I am confused greatly and any help would be really neat.

[Klaynos]

The higgs boson, is the mediating particle of the higgs field, so the particles are normally virtual. It's similar to how when a photon (or normally two) create particle - antiparticle pairs they interact differently with each other (in the strong, weak and EM forces) than the photons would... You're not actually creating the mediating particles they're virtual, of course you can create them if you make high energy particle beams hit each other with a high enough energy, the Higgs Boson has a mass of about 144 GeV, which is why the LHC with an upper energy of about 450GeV should be able to create them, even if they'll be very short lived (they decay).

[foodchain]

The higgs boson, is the mediating particle of the higgs field, so the particles are normally virtual. It's similar to how when a photon (or normally two) create particle - antiparticle pairs they interact differently with each other (in the strong, weak and EM forces) than the photons would... You're not actually creating the mediating particles they're virtual, of course you can create them if you make high energy particle beams hit each other with a high enough energy, the Higgs Boson has a mass of about 144 GeV, which is why the LHC with an upper energy of about 450GeV should be able to create them, even if they'll be very short lived (they decay).

 

 

Thanks for the help, two questions though if you would.

 

1) Is a more proper view of wave-particle duality as being a field then?

 

2) Would the higgs boson then basically be a specific manifestation of a field as a particle?

 

I think I am way off track and I am looking to get back on track but a lot of the terms are complex of course and new to me.

[Quetzalcoatl]

hello foodchain, I'm also trying to find info on how the higgs mechanism works. From what I could figure, the higgs boson is the quanta of the higgs field (whatever that is), and the coupling strength between the higgs field and the other fields (aka particles) governs their mass. The EM field (photons), for example, probably doesn't have an interaction (coupling) with the higgs field which is why the photon doesn't have a mass, and the EM field doesn't have what's called a 'mass term' in its Lagrangian (a term linear to the field itself as opposed to its deriviatives). I don't know the math of the Higgs mechanism, though.

 

Maybe someone could explain an intuitive approach, if not mathematical one, to explain the 'Higgs mechanism' considering the length limitations of this post?

[ajb]

You might be interested in the Landu-Ginzburg model which is a simple non-abelian Higgs theory.