Higgsbosonens

The Higgs boson, sometimes referred to as the Higgs, is a scalar elementary particle associated with the Higgs field. It is part of the electroweak sector of the Standard Model and plays a central role in the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles through electroweak symmetry breaking.

In 2012, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider announced the discovery of a new boson with a mass around 125 GeV, consistent with the Higgs boson. Its observed properties—spin 0, CP-even, and couplings to fermions and gauge bosons that scale with mass—align with Standard Model predictions within current uncertainties. The Higgs is produced primarily through gluon fusion, with vector boson fusion and associated production also observed. It decays through multiple channels, including gamma gamma, ZZ*, WW*, bb, and tau+ tau-.

The discovery confirmed the mechanism by which particles acquire mass in the Standard Model: interactions with the Higgs field endow W and Z bosons, as well as fermions, with mass. While measurements of the Higgs boson's properties largely agree with the Standard Model, ongoing and future precision studies seek possible deviations that could signal new physics, such as extended Higgs sectors, supersymmetry, or other beyond-Standard-Model theories. The Higgs sector has implications for vacuum stability and cosmology, including conditions in the early universe.

Current and planned research continues to refine estimates of the Higgs couplings, search for the Higgs self-coupling, and probe rare or forbidden decays. Future colliders are expected to improve precision and test for additional Higgs states or new interactions beyond the Standard Model.