Peter Higgs, the “God particle” and a story that begins with some bottles of wine | PROFILE | Nobel Prize in Physics | Higgs boson | science | TECHNOLOGY

“My main duty was to purchase and take care of the supply of wine that would be served each night at dinner.”said the award-winning physicist. That event was the first Scottish Universities Physics Summer School.

But the anecdote did not stop there: “Among the students there were four who stayed up late into the night discussing theoretical physics, and rarely got up in time for the first lecture the next day.”Higgs said.

Later, one of them would confess that their nightly discussions were colored by the bottles of wine they hid. Due to his unusual supervisory role, he was unable to participate in the talks.

Why did you remember that function so distant from your work as a physicist?

That was his first year at the University of Edinburgh, where shortly after he would be appointed professor of Mathematical Physics. In 1961 he accessed articles by Yoichiro Nambu and Jeffrey Goldstone on models of symmetry breaking in particle physics. He recalled in his speech that Goldstone used scalar fields, with a “wine bottle” potential (wine again), and the following years were of discussion among theorists around Goldstone’s theorem, until the intervention of Higgs. .

“It was at this point that my intervention occurred. I read the article [Wally] Gilbert on July 16, 1964 and it bothered me because it implied that there was no way to evade Goldstone’s theorem.”, said. Then he would write a paper that was accepted by Physics Letters, and it would mark the beginning of a new discussion.

The Higgs proposal has been known as the Higgs Mechanism, in which a solution is given to the problem of how to give mass to particles and where two terms must be considered fundamentally: Higgs Field and Higgs Boson.

Why does the “God particle” matter?

First, the so-called “God particle” is the name given to the Higgs boson, but it is not an official name. It goes back to the book The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?published in 1993 by the Nobel Prize winner in physics, León M. Lederman, which refers to the much-sought boson that until then was a theory.

And what made him so sought after?

This is where the European Center for Nuclear Research or European Laboratory for Elementary Particle Physics (CERN) intervenes, to date the most important laboratory in the world.

On its website, CERN details that in nature each particle is a wave in a field and, in the case of the Higgs boson, the field came first.

“The Higgs field was proposed in 1964 as a new type of field that fills the entire Universe and gives mass to all elementary particles. The Higgs boson is a wave in that field. “The discovery of it confirms the existence of the Higgs field.”indica.

In other words, detecting this Higgs boson is getting closer to understanding the origin of everything, or rather, of a dynamic. CERN explains that “The stronger a particle interacts with the Higgs field, the heavier the particle ends up being. Photons, for example, do not interact with this field and therefore have no mass. However, other elementary particles, including electrons, quarks, and bosons, interact and therefore have various masses.”.

Finding that boson was not easy. Five decades passed until CERN found the particle in 2012. “The Higgs boson cannot be “discovered” by finding it somewhere, but must be created through a collision of particles. Once created, it transforms (or “decays”) into other particles that can be detected in particle detectors.”indica.

This explains the large laboratory setup. After patient analysis of the data, the boson could be detected.

An award with controversy

At the age of 84, Higgs reached the summit with the Nobel Prize in Physics and found out about it from an old neighbor. This is how she commented to the press, once his name was known. “He congratulated me on the news and I said, what news?”said the physicist. And, according to the AFP agency in 2013, the award-winning scientist did not use a cell phone, did not have email and did not watch television.

By then he was living in Edinburgh. When she returned to his house she began to read the congratulatory messages that came to his family. “There was a celebration last night. That was the beginning and tonight I will celebrate with my family with the help of a bottle or two of champagne.”he commented.

But the award of Higgs was not immune to controversy. On the one hand, the theoretical debate generated in the 60s would be remembered, since Higgs was not the only one to propose a particle mechanism. That same year that Higgs published his article, scientists Robert Brout and François Englert came to a similar solution. Then other names would appear: Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble.

In his award speech Higgs He acknowledged that he was not familiar with Englert and Brout’s work and, before publishing his article, added a footnote. It is worth noting that in 2013, along with Higgs, François Englert was also awarded. Brout had already passed away.

But the controversy was not limited to the various authors. Anders Barany, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the jury, said the prize should have gone to CERN, which confirmed the discovery. “I think (the decision) was wrong”he told the AFP agency. “I think these experimental researchers have done a fantastic job and should be rewarded”he added.

And the life of Higgs although austere and simple, has not been immune to debate. “It took some time for the work of Englert, Brout and myself (and that of Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble, who published a little later) to gain acceptance”he explained upon receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics, as a kind of recognition of his generation.