rickreynoldssf 2 days ago | next [–]

I’m an airchair physics person so I’m curious how close my layman understanding of this matches reality… So Higgs particles don’t exist under normal conditions, they’re just proof that the Higgs field exists and explains how mass exists. When the energy that’s perturbing the Higgs field dissipates it does so through other fields perturbing them to create one of their particles and so on.

Sci-Fi or Fact or somewhere in the middle?

RickyS 2 days ago | parent | next [–]

Experimental particle physicist here. What you say about Higgs particles “they don’t exist under normal condition” is loosely true of all particles in nature in the sense that a particle is nothing but a “quantum” of a “field”. Fields pervade all physical space and can vary in time. Particles (or quanta) simply represent a local state of observable things. A field can only do certain things to certain physical states and at a probabilistic level. Notice that fields do things even with the vacuum which is just another state from which particles can be “extracted”.

The peculiar experimental challenge about the Higgs field is that it can extract its quanta from certain physical states (certain initial conditions in a particle physics reaction) only at very high energy and with low probability, but that is true also for other particles. Its truly peculiar thing is that the presence of the Higgs field, in addition to the fields of all other particles that we know of, explains why quanta in general have a mass (although this is not clear for neutrinos) through a mechanism where the Higgs field interacts with the quanta of other particles.

— LHC experiments see first evidence of a rare Higgs boson decay

— Hacker News

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2023.06.02 Friday ACHK