Why does the higgs have mass

The story of the new model begins when the cosmos was an energy-infused dot. The axion mattress was extremely compressed, which made the Higgs mass enormous. As the universe expanded, the springs relaxed, as if their energy were spreading through the springs of the newly created space. As the energy dissipated, so did the Higgs mass.

When the mass fell to its present value, it caused a related variable to plunge past zero, switching on the Higgs field, a molasseslike entity that gives mass to the particles that move through it, such as electrons and quarks. Massive quarks in turn interacted with the axion field, creating ridges in the metaphoric hill that its energy had been rolling down.

The axion field got stuck. And so did the Higgs mass. In what Sundrum called a radical break from past models, the new one shows how the modern-day mass hierarchy might have been sculpted by the birth of the cosmos.

Dimopoulos remarked on the striking minimalism of the model, which employs mostly pre-established ideas. It took very clever young people to realize that.

Recently, the Axion Dark Matter eXperiment at the University of Washington in Seattle began looking for the rare conversions of dark matter axions into light inside strong magnetic fields. For example, in order for the axion field to have gotten stuck on the ridges created by the quarks rather than rolling past them, cosmic inflation must have progressed much more slowly than most cosmologists have assumed. It might eventually be possible to oscillate an axion field, for example, to see whether this affects the masses of nearby elementary particles, by way of the Higgs mass.

We believe that it gains this albeit tiny mass due to the fact that it is influenced by the Higgs field. Without this influence, our Universe would have a completely different structure. A massless electron would therefore be at infinity from the proton, not allowing atoms to form at all.

In Nature, heavier particles tend to decay into lighter, more stables particles. In addition, the up and down quarks, that combine to form protons uud as well as neutrons udd , gain mass from their interaction with the Higgs field. Scientists are now studying the characteristic properties of the Higgs boson to determine if it precisely matches the predictions of the Standard Model of particle physics.

If the Higgs boson deviates from the model, it may provide clues to new particles that only interact with other Standard Model particles through the Higgs boson and thereby lead to new scientific discoveries. It is currently the only place scientists can create and study Higgs bosons.

But this field also gives mass to the Higgs boson itself. Comparing precise measurements of these two properties is a crucial means of testing the predictions of the Standard Model and helps search for physics beyond the predictions of this theory. Analysis of much more data was needed before reducing the errors in such a measurement. Now, the CMS collaboration has announced the most precise measurement so far of this property: The mass measurement was based on two very different transformations of the Higgs boson, namely decays to four leptons via two intermediate Z bosons and decays to pairs of photons.