Comparison:
A stationary electron, much like the vibration of a guitar string, is a standing wave that vibrates with a preferred frequency, known as its resonant frequency. Such resonant vibration is common and familiar. Because a plucked guitar string consistently rings at its resonant frequency, it always makes the same tone. Likewise, the fixed frequency of a swinging pendulum is what makes it an effective clock. On the same principle, every stationary electron vibrates with the resonant frequency of the electron field.
If you have your quantum physics playlist on perhaps you can listen for the vibrations of the Higgs boson. Physicist Matt Strassler believes we need to leave molasses and deep snow comparisons behind if we're to better understand the innermost workings of our universe.
Context:
A common approach [toward explaining how the Higgs field accomplishes the mighty task of generating masses of elementary particles] has been to tell a tall tale. Here’s one version:
There’s this substance, like a soup, that fills the universe; that’s the Higgs field. As particles move through it, the soup slows them down, and that’s how particles get mass.
Other versions portray the Higgs field as akin to molasses, a thicket, a crowd of people or an expanse of snow.
However, all such stories conflict with what we physicists teach in the very first weeks of first-year university courses. By suggesting that the Higgs field creates mass by exerting drag, they violate both Newton’s first and second laws of motion. Among other disasters, this drag would long ago have caused the Earth to spiral into the Sun. Moreover, if the Higgs field were really a substance, it would provide a point of comparison against which we could measure our absolute motion, violating both Galileo’s and Einstein’s principles of relativity.
In truth, the Higgs field has nothing to do with motion or slowing. Instead, its story is all about vibration.
Quantum field theory, the powerful framework of modern particle physics, says the universe is filled with fields. Examples include the electromagnetic field, the gravitational field and the Higgs field itself. For each field, there’s a corresponding type of particle, best understood as a little ripple in that field. The electromagnetic field’s ripples are light waves, and its gentlest ripples are the particles of light, which we call photons. Similarly, electrons are ripples in the electron field, and the Higgs boson is a minimal ripple in the Higgs field.
A stationary electron, much like the vibration of a guitar string, is a standing wave that vibrates with a preferred frequency, known as its resonant frequency. Such resonant vibration is common and familiar. Because a plucked guitar string consistently rings at its resonant frequency, it always makes the same tone. Likewise, the fixed frequency of a swinging pendulum is what makes it an effective clock. On the same principle, every stationary electron vibrates with the resonant frequency of the electron field.
Most of the universe’s fields have resonant frequencies. In a sense, the cosmos loosely resembles a musical instrument; both have characteristic frequencies at which they most readily vibrate.
Citation:
Strassler, Matt. "How the Higgs Field (Actually) Gives Mass to Elementary Particles." Quanta Magazine, quanta magazine.org, 03 Sept. 2024. Web.
(Illustration courtesy of Quanta Magazine and Michele Sclafani via SFU Sept. 2024)
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