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Thus the previously cited reaction is an ideal method for producing and detecting Higgs bosons. Dominant contribution to the production of the Higgs boson. Hence attempts to produce Higgs bosons are made more difficult by the need to first produce the very heavy particles to which they couple.įIGURE 28. The Higgs boson therefore couples very weakly to light particles like neutrinos, electrons, muons, and u, d, s quarks and much more strongly to heavy particles like W ± and Z 0 bosons, and presumably b and t quarks. However, its couplings to other particles are predicted, and are essentially proportional to the mass of the particle to which it couples. A problem in designing suitable experiments is that its mass is not predicted by the theory. The existence of the Higgs boson is the most important prediction of the standard model which has not been verified by experiment, and searches for it are a high priority. The second is that there are electrically neutral quanta associated with the Higgs field, called Higgs bosons, in the same way that there are quanta associated with the electromagnetic field, i.e., photons. The first is that gauge bosons can acquire masses without violating the gauge invariance of the interaction. This problem, called the origin of mass, is overcome by assuming that the various particles interact with a new type of field, called the Higgs field, whose existence can be shown to have two consequences. In this case the result is even stronger and it can be shown that gauge invariance requires that the fundamental particles-the quarks, leptons, and gauge bosons- all have zero masses if gauge bosons are the only bosons in the theory. Gauge invariance also plays an important role in the unified electroweak theory, where it is needed to ensure the cancellation of the divergences which occur in individual Feynman diagrams. This is fine for QED and QCD, since the gauge bosons are the photons and gluons and they do indeed have zero masses. This symmetry is called gauge invariance, and it can be shown to require that the spin-1 “gauge bosons” have zero masses if they are the only bosons in the theory. It is required because of a fundamental symmetry associated with theories in which the force carriers are spin-1 bosons. The Higgs boson is a neutral spin-0 boson whose existence is predicted by the unified electroweak theory, but which has not yet been observed. Brian Martin, Graham Shaw, in Encyclopedia of Physical Science and Technology (Third Edition), 2003 V.E The Higgs Boson