Podcast of Interview About the Higgs at CERN

If you want to listen to an interview from National Public Radio's (NPR) Science Friday, check this out. They talk about the Higgs boson search at CERN with one of the co-spokesman for the CMS experiment, one of the two big collider experiments at CERN looking for the Higgs (and many other things).

Also, here is a neat way to think about what the Higgs field does. It comes from http://www.hep.ucl.ac.uk/~djm/higgsa.html:

" The Higgs Mechanism
Imagine a cocktail party of political party workers who are uniformly distributed across the floor, all talking to their nearest neighbours. The ex-Prime- Minister enters and crosses the room. All of the workers in her neighbourhood are strongly attracted to her and cluster round her. As she moves she attracts the people she comes close to, while the ones she has left return to their even spacing. Because of the knot of people always clustered around her she acquires a greater mass than normal, that is, she has more momentum for the same speed of movement across the room. Once moving she is harder to stop, and once stopped she is harder to get moving again because the clustering process has to be restarted. In three dimensions, and with the complications of relativity, this is the Higgs mechanism. In order to give particles mass, a background field is invented which becomes locally distorted whenever a particle moves through it. The distortion - the clustering of the field around the particle - generates the particle's mass. The idea comes directly from the Physics of Solids. Instead of a field spread throughout all space a solid contains a lattice of positively charged crystal atoms. When an electron moves through the lattice the atoms are attracted to it, causing the electron's effective mass to be as much as 40 times bigger than the mass of a free electron. The postulated Higgs field in the vacuum is a sort of hypothetical lattice which fills our Universe. We need it because otherwise we cannot explain why the Z and W particles which carry the Weak Interactions are so heavy while the photon which carries Electromagnetic forces is massless. "
- David Miller

Here Comes the Higgs?!?!

A recently published article, summarizing new data presented at a high energy physics conference in Europe, show an excess of particles in the mass spectrum that may end up being the Higgs boson, as some like Nobel winner Leon Lederman have called the 'God particle.' This is a particle that has been predicted for some 45 years, from a theory known as the Standard Model. This is the theory that covers the known forces and particles in Nature, minus gravity. It has been wildly successful when compared with experimental data, and one of the key pieces is the Higgs boson and Higgs field. This particle and field are responsible for nothing less than the matter we are all made from. It is the theoretical mechanism that allows energy to transform into matter, which is summed up by Einstein's E = mc^2.

Physicists on the experiments producing these data do caution the world NOT to jump to any conclusions. In science, rumors are left just as that, rumors. There are strict statistical results that are needed before one can claim discovery. There are double and triple checks of analysis algorithms, calibrations of the detectors, fine-tuning theoretical programs called Monte Carlos to re-check the backgrounds for these types of particle decays, and many other checks before anyone would even think of calling a few excess events a discovery, especially something as vital as the Higgs. We will see over the next few months what the final conclusions are, but this provides a sense of excitement for the world of physics.

For a simple explanation of what the 'Higgs field' is, check out this video, produced at Fermilab.