The Higgs boson is an elementary particle that was predicted to exist by the physicist Peter Higgs and others in the 1960s as part of the theory explaining the origin of mass in the universe. The existence of the Higgs boson was confirmed in experiments conducted at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012.
According to the theory, particles acquire mass through their interaction with a field called the Higgs field, which permeates all of space. The Higgs boson is an excitation of this field, similar to how a photon is an excitation of the electromagnetic field. It is often referred to as the "God particle," a term coined by the physicist Leon Lederman in his book of the same name. However, many scientists prefer not to use this term due to its popularized and sometimes misleading connotations.
The discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC was a significant milestone in the field of particle physics. It provided experimental confirmation of the mechanism proposed by the Higgs field and its associated particle, which is crucial for our understanding of the fundamental forces and the origin of mass in the universe. The Higgs boson is a very short-lived particle and quickly decays into other particles after being produced in high-energy collisions. Its discovery was achieved through analyzing the decay products and the detection of their characteristic signatures.
The Higgs boson's discovery was a major achievement for the scientific community and contributed to the completion of the Standard Model of particle physics, which describes the known elementary particles and their interactions.