Higgs Field with a Touch of Time Travel!

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HIGGS FIELD WITH A

TOUCH OF TIME TRAVEL


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Hi everyone!

Here is a short video I made explaining the important aspects of the Higgs Field.



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Imagine if we could time travel!

However, the fact that you and I have mass prevents us from doing so. And light, as we know, (when we talk about it at the particle level) is constituted of photons, which are massless.

Massless particles can travel neither slower, nor faster than the speed of light. They can only travel exactly at the speed of light!

According to the special theory of relativity, if we could travel faster than the speed of light, we would be travelling back in time. If massless particles travel at the speed of light and particles with mass travel slower than the speed of light, what would travel faster than the speed of light? Hold on to that thought until the end of this article.

Unlike photons, many subatomic particles, like electrons, have some mass. So, where do some of our elementary particles – particles which are the smallest building blocks of our universe get their mass from?

Theoretically, these fundamental particles were not supposed to have mass…
Then we discovered the Higgs Field.

Consider the river to be this field. We are walking towards the river with the same speed as that of a bird flying over. As we walk through this river, we interact with the particles of water which slows us down. However, when the bird flies over its surface, it doesn’t interact with the water, and hence continues to travel at the same speed.

Consider us, to be an electron, the bird to be a photon, and the water to be the Higgs field. It is the energy due to a similar interaction which causes the particles interacting with the Higgs field to get mass. (E = mc^2)

Based on how much a particle interacts with the field, it gets its mass. Following this, the W boson acquires a larger mass while photons do not have mass.
Before this interaction, all particles are EQUAL, just like how my speed and the bird’s speed before going in the river were equal.

The Higgs Field is a cosmic quantum field throughout the entire universe and as particles move through it, they are imbued with mass by this field.

But why is this field so special? 
If electrons had no mass, they would travel at the speed of light, which would not have made it possible for them to bind to atoms by electromagnetic forces. No atoms mean no matter and, we would not exist today.

This field also produces a ‘Higgs boson’ - the God particle, proof of an invisible, universe-wide field that gave mass to all matter right after the big bang. However, proving the existence of this particle was very difficult, because due to its instability, it transforms into other constituents like electrons. It was proven by colliding particles at high energies, in accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider.

Moreover, we have vector fields – with direction and magnitude, like electromagnetic field; and a scalar field – which has only magnitude. Quantum particles associated with a vector field have a quantum spin. The Higgs Field is the first scalar quantum field we have found, and the Higgs boson is the first ‘elementary’ scalar particle ever seen, with no quantum spin.

Coming to the question asked earlier, how would we travel back in time? 
Tachyons are hypothetical particles that have ‘negative mass’ – travel faster than the speed of light and hence can travel back in time. However, it is believed that particles faster than the speed of light cannot exist, as they are not consistent with the known laws of physics.

Can you find an answer to this?

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Hope you all learnt something new from this :)

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I am still learning Particle physics, but will try my best to answer your questions :)

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With Warm Wishes,
Lavanya

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