The Higgs boson or Higgs particle is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics. The Higgs boson is predicted to exist for theoretical reasons, and may have been detected by experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. If confirmed, this detection would prove the existence of the hypothetical Higgs field—the simplest[4] of several proposed mechanisms for the breaking of electroweak symmetry, and the means by which elementary particles acquire mass.[Note 3] The leading explanation is that a field exists that has non-zero strength everywhere—even in otherwise empty space—and that particles acquire mass when interacting with this so-called Higgs field. If this theory is true, a matching particle—the smallest possible excitation of the Higgs field—should also exist and be detectable, providing a crucial test of the theory. Consequently, it has been the target of a long search in particle physics.
The Higgs boson is named after Peter Higgs who, along with two other teams, proposed the mechanism that suggested such a particle in 1964[6][7][8] and was the only one to explicitly predict the massive particle and identify some of its theoretical properties.[9] In mainstream media it is often referred to as the "God particle", after the title of Leon Lederman's book on the topic (1993). Although the particle is both important and extremely difficult to prove, the epithet is strongly disliked by many physicists, who regard it as inappropriate sensationalism since the particle has nothing to do with a god nor any mystical associations,[10][11] and because the term is misleading: the crucial focus of study is to learn how the symmetry-breaking mechanism takes place in nature — the search for the boson is part of, and a key step towards, this goal.
In the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a boson, a type of particle that allows multiple identical particles to exist in the same place in the same quantum state. It has no spin, electric charge, or colour charge. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately. Some extensions of the Standard Model predict the existence of more than one kind of Higgs boson.
On 4 July 2012, the CMS and the ATLAS experimental teams at the Large Hadron Collider independently announced that they each confirmed the formal discovery of a previously unknown boson of mass between 125 and 127 GeV/c2, whose behaviour so far has been "consistent with" a Higgs boson. Proof of the Higgs field (by observing the associated particle) and evidence of its properties are likely to greatly affect human understanding of the universe, validate the final unconfirmed part of the Standard Model as essentially correct, indicate which of several current particle physics theories are more likely correct, and open up "new" physics beyond current theories.[12] If the Higgs boson were shown not to exist, other alternative sources for the Higgs mechanism would need to be considered.
In particle physics, elementary particles and forces give rise to the world around us. Physicists explain the behaviour of these particles and how they interact using the Standard Model—a widely accepted and "remarkably" accurate[13]:22 framework based on quantum fields and symmetries believed to explain most of the world we see around us.[14] Initially, when this model was being developed, it seemed that the mathematics behind the model, which was satisfactory in areas already tested, would forbid elementary particles from having any mass, which showed clearly that these initial models were incomplete. In 1964 three groups of physicists almost simultaneously released papers describing how masses could be given to these particles, using an approach known as spontaneous symmetry breaking. Symmetry breaking allows the necessary particles to acquire a mass, without explicitly breaking the symmetrues that prevent the theory from going haywire. This idea became known as the Higgs mechanism, and later experiments confirmed that such a mechanism does exist—but they could not show exactly how it happens.
While there are several symmetries in nature that are spontaneously broken through a form of the Higgs mechanism, in the context of the Standard Model the term "Higgs mechanism" almost always signifies the mechanism responsible for symmetry breaking of the electroweak field. Electroweak symmetry breaking (EWSB) itself is considered proven, and believed responsible for the mass of fundamental particles and also the differences between the electromagnetic and weak nuclear interactions which cease to be unified below a very high temperature of about 1015 K. But the exact cause has been exceedingly difficult to prove; the lack of adequate data in this area has also limited the development and testing of more advanced ideas.
The leading and simplest theory is that a particular kind of "field" (known as the Higgs field) exists, which in contrast to the more familiar gravitational field and electromagnetic field has constant strength everywhere. This kind of field was shown in the 1960s to be theoretically capable of producing a Higgs mechanism in nature, and particles interacting with this field will acquire mass. During the 1960s and 1970s the Standard Model of physics was developed on this basis, and it included a prediction and requirement that for these things to be true, there had to be an undiscovered fundamental particle as the counterpart of this field. This particle would be the Higgs boson (or "Higgs particle"), the last unobserved particle of the Standard Model. Finding the Higgs boson would confirm this part of the Standard Model and allow further development, while its non-existence would confirm that other theories are needed instead.
- Useful terminology
- The Higgs mechanism shows how some particles can gain mass by symmetry breaking without affecting parts of current physics theory that are believed approximately correct. (More exactly, it shows how gauge-dependent expressions for some particles' mass can arise even in a gauge-invariant theory). In the Standard Model the term almost always refers to electroweak symmetry breaking (EWSB) which is responsible for the mass of some gauge bosons (a kind of elementary particle). The existence of some kind of symmetry breaking Higgs mechanism is believed proven, although there are a number of ways it could happen and physicists have not yet determined which of these takes place in nature.
- The Higgs field is the current preferred theory of how the Higgs mechanism occurs. If correct, then a field exists throughout space that is responsible for the Higgs mechanism and the resultant electroweak symmetry breaking. The field — if it exists — would have a related particle, which would be a previously unknown type of boson. That field can be proven to exist and its properties studied, by finding and examining the boson and studying its properties. The Standard Model allows for extensions where the details of the Higgs field and number of related Higgs bosons can differ. If the Higgs field does not exist then other approaches could explain how the Higgs mechanism arises, and these would be examined instead.
- The Higgs boson is the massive and fleetingly short-lived boson associated with a Higgs field, and also the Higgs field's smallest possible excitation, or quantum. If the preferred theory is correct, then this massive boson will exist, and can be detected in experiments and tested to see whether it is a Higgs boson. If successful, this would prove the Higgs field exists, which in turn will confirm that the Higgs mechanism takes place. Further studies would be needed to test which model among the Standard Model and its extensions best describes the experimental findings. At present as of 2012, a particle has been detected but not yet tested fully to show if it is a Higgs boson.
History
See also: 1964 PRL symmetry breaking papers and Higgs mechanism
 _cropped.jpg) The six authors of the 1964 PRL papers, who received the 2010 J. J. Sakurai Prize for their work. From left to right: Kibble, Guralnik, Hagen, Englert, Brout. Right: Higgs. |
The Higgs mechanism is a process by which vector bosons can get rest mass without explicitly breaking gauge invariance.[citation needed] The proposal for such a spontaneous symmetry breaking mechanism originally[citation needed] was suggested in 1962 by Philip Warren Anderson[16] and developed into a full relativistic model, independently and almost simultaneously, by three groups of physicists: by François Englert and Robert Brout in August 1964;[6] by Peter Higgs in October 1964;[7] and by Gerald Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, and Tom Kibble (GHK) in November 1964.[8][citation needed] Properties of the model were further considered by Guralnik in 1965,[17] by Higgs in 1966 [18] and by Kibble in 1967.[19] The papers showed that when a gauge theory is combined with an additional field that spontaneously breaks the symmetry group, the gauge bosons can consistently acquire a finite mass.[citation needed] In 1967, Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam were the first to apply the Higgs mechanism to the breaking of the electroweak symmetry, and showed how a Higgs mechanism could be incorporated into Sheldon Glashow's electroweak theory,[20][21][22] in what became the Standard Model of particle physics.[citation needed]
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In the paper by Higgs the boson is massive, and in a closing sentence Higgs writes that "an essential feature" of the theory "is the prediction of incomplete multiplets of scalar and vector bosons".[citation needed] In the paper by GHK the boson is massless and decoupled from the massive states.[citation needed] In reviews dated 2009 and 2011, Guralnik states that in the GHK model the boson is massless only in a lowest-order approximation, but it is not subject to any constraint and acquires mass at higher orders, and adds that the GHK paper was the only one to show that there are no massless Goldstone bosons in the model and to give a complete analysis of the general Higgs mechanism.[26][27]
In addition to explaining how mass is acquired by vector bosons, the Higgs mechanism also predicts the ratio between the W boson and Z boson masses as well as their couplings with each other and with the Standard Model quarks and leptons.[citation needed] Subsequently, many of these predictions have been verified by precise measurements performed at the LEP and the SLC colliders, thus overwhelmingly confirming that some kind of Higgs mechanism does take place in nature,[28] but the exact manner by which it happens has not yet been discovered.[citation needed] The results of searching for the Higgs boson are expected to provide evidence about how this is realized in nature.[citation needed]
Theoretical properties
Main article: Higgs mechanism
Theoretical need for the Higgs
Gauge invariance is an important property of the Standard Model. However, fermions with a mass term violate the gauge symmetry of the electroweak force. (This can be seen by examining the Dirac Lagrangian for a fermion in terms of left and right handed components; we find none of the spin-half particles could ever flip helicity as required for mass, so they must be massless.[Note 4]) W and Z bosons are observed to have mass, but a boson mass term contains terms which clearly depend on the choice of gauge and therefore these masses too cannot be gauge invariant. Therefore it seems that none of the standard model fermions or bosons could "begin" with mass as an inbuilt property except by abandoning gauge invariance. If gauge invariance were to be retained, then these particles had to be acquiring their mass by some other mechanism or interaction. Additionally, whatever was giving these particles their mass, had to not "break" gauge invariance as the basis for other parts of the theories where it worked well.The solution to both these problems came from the discovery of a previously un-noticed borderline case hidden in the mathematics of Goldstone's theorem, that under certain conditions it might theoretically be possible for a symmetry to be broken without disrupting gauge invariance: this became known as the Higgs mechanism.
The Standard Model hypothesizes a field which is responsible for this effect, called the Higgs field (symbol:
), which has the unusual property of a non-zero amplitude in its ground state; i.e. a non-zero vacuum expectation value. The existence of this non-zero vacuum expectation spontaneously breaks electroweak gauge symmetry which in turn gives rise to the Higgs mechanism. This effect occurs because scalar field components of the Higgs field are "absorbed" by the massive bosons as degrees of freedom, and couple to the fermions via Yukawa coupling, thereby producing the expected mass terms. It is the simplest known process capable of giving mass to the gauge bosons while remaining compatible with gauge theories.[29] Its quantum would be a scalar boson, known as the Higgs boson.[30]In layman’s terms such a Higgs field was famously imagined by physicist David Miller as akin to a room full of political party workers spread evenly throughout a room.[31][32] There will be some people (in Miller's example an anonymous person) who pass through the crowd with ease, paralleling the interaction between the field and massless photons. There will be other people (in Miller's example the British prime minister) who would find their progress being continually slowed by the swarm of admirers crowding around him/her, paralleling the interaction for particles that acquires a finite mass.
Properties of the Standard Model Higgs
In the Standard Model, the Higgs field consists of four components, two neutral ones and two charged component fields. Both of the charged components and one of the neutral fields are Goldstone bosons, which act as the longitudinal third-polarization components of the massive W+, W–, and Z bosons. The quantum of the remaining neutral component corresponds to (and is theoretically realised as) the massive Higgs boson.[33] Since the Higgs field is a scalar field (meaning it does not transform under Lorentz transformations), the Higgs boson has no spin. The Higgs boson is also its own antiparticle and is CP-even, and has zero electric and colour charge.[34]The Minimal Standard Model does not predict the mass of the Higgs boson.[35] If that mass is between 115 and 180 GeV/c2, then the Standard Model can be valid at energy scales all the way up to the Planck scale (1019 GeV).[36] Many theorists expect new physics beyond the Standard Model to emerge at the TeV-scale, based on unsatisfactory properties of the Standard Model.[37] The highest possible mass scale allowed for the Higgs boson (or some other electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism) is 1.4 TeV; beyond this point, the Standard Model becomes inconsistent without such a mechanism, because unitarity is violated in certain scattering processes.[38]
It is also possible -although experimentally difficult- to estimate the mass of the Higgs boson indirectly. In the Standard Model, the Higgs boson has a number of indirect effects; most notably, Higgs loops result in tiny corrections to masses of W and Z bosons. Precision measurements of electroweak parameters, such as the Fermi constant and masses of W/Z bosons, can be used to calculate constraints on the mass of the Higgs. As of July 2011, the precision electroweak measurements tell us that the mass of the Higgs boson is likely to be less than about 161 GeV/c2 at 95% confidence level (this upper limit would increase to 185 GeV/c2 if the lower bound of 114.4 GeV/c2 from the LEP-2 direct search is allowed for[28]). These indirect constraints rely on the assumption that the Standard Model is correct. It may still be possible to discover a Higgs boson above these masses if it is accompanied by other particles beyond those predicted by the Standard Model.[39]
Alternative models
Main article: Alternatives to the Standard Model Higgs
The Minimal Standard Model as described above contains the simplest possible model for the Higgs mechanism with just one Higgs field. However, it also is possible to have an extended Higgs sector with additional doublets or triplets. The non-minimal Higgs sector favoured by theory are the two-Higgs-doublet models (2HDM), which predict the existence of a quintet of scalar particles: two CP-even neutral Higgs bosons h0 and H0, a CP-odd neutral Higgs boson A0, and two charged Higgs particles H±. The key method to distinguish different variations of the 2HDM models and the minimal SM involves their coupling and the branching ratios of the Higgs decays. The so called Type-I model has one Higgs doublet coupling to up and down quarks, while the second doublet does not couple to quarks. This model has two interesting limits, in which the lightest Higgs doesn't couple to either fermions (fermiophobic) or gauge bosons (gauge-phobic). In the 2HDM of Type-II, one Higgs doublet only couples to up-type quarks, while the other only couples to down-type quarks.[40]Many extensions to the Standard Model, including supersymmetry (SUSY), often contain an extended Higgs sector. Supersymmetric models predict relations between the Higgs-boson masses and the masses of the gauge bosons, and can accommodate a neutral Higgs boson with a mass around 125 GeV/c2. The heavily researched Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) belongs to the class of models with a Type-II two-Higgs-doublet sector and could be ruled out by the observation of a Higgs belonging to a Type-I 2HDM.[citation needed]
In other models the Higgs scalar is a composite particle. For example, in Technicolor the role of the Higgs field is played by strongly bound pairs of fermions called techniquarks. Other models, feature pairs of top quarks (see top quark condensate). In yet other models, there is no Higgs field at all and the electroweak symmetry is broken using extra dimensions[disambiguation needed].[41][42]
Production
A Higgs particle can be produced in a particle collider by taking two particles and smashing them together at very high energies. The exact process depends on the details of the particles used and the energy at which they are collided. [43][44][45] But in any case the probability of producing a Higgs boson in any collision is always expected to be very small with only 1 Higgs boson being produced per 10 billion collisions.[Note 5] The most common processes are the following:| Feynman diagrams for Higgs production | |
|---|---|
 Gluon fusion |  Higgs Strahlung |
 Vector boson fusion |  Top fusion |
- Gluon fusion. If the collided particles are hadrons such as the proton or antiproton—as is the case in the LHC and Tevatron—then it's most likely that two of the gluons binding the hadron together collide. The easiest way to produce a Higgs particle is if the two gluons combine to form a loop of virtual quarks. Since the coupling of particles to the Higgs boson is proportional to their mass, this process is more likely for heavy particles. In practice it is enough to consider the contributions of virtual top and bottom quarks (the heaviest quarks). This process is the dominant contribution at the LHC and Tevatron being about ten times more likely than any of the other processes.[43][44]
- Higgs Strahlung. If an elementary fermion collides with an anti-fermion—e.g. a quark with an anti-quark or an electron with a positron—the two can merge to form a virtual W or Z boson which, if it carries sufficient energy, can then emit a Higgs boson. This process was the dominant production mode at the LEP, where an electron and a positron collided to form a virtual Z boson, and it was the second largest contribution for Higgs production at the Tevatron. At the LHC this process is only the third largest, because the LHC collides protons with protons, making a quark-antiquark collision less likely than at the Tevatron.[43][44][45]
- Weak boson fusion. Another possibility when two (anti-)fermions collide is that the two exchange a virtual W or Z boson, which emits a Higgs boson. The colliding fermions do not need to be the same type. So, for example, an up quark may exchange a Z boson with an anti-down quark. This process is the second most important for the production of Higgs particle at the LHC and LEP.[43][45]
- Top fusion. The final process that is commonly considered is by far the least likely (by two orders of magnitude). This process involves two colliding gluons, which each decay into a heavy quark-antiquark pair. A quark and anti-quark from each pair can then combine to form a Higgs particle.[43][44]
Decay
One way that the Higgs can decay is by splitting into a fermion-antifermion pair. As general rule, the Higgs is more likely to decay into heavy fermions than light fermions, because the mass of a fermion is proportional to the strength of its interaction with the Higgs.[49] By this logic the most common decay should be into a top-antitop quark pair. However, such a decay is only possible if the Higgs is heavier than ~346 GeV/c2, twice the mass of the top quark. For a Higgs mass of 126 GeV/c2 the SM predicts that the most common decay is into a bottom–antibottom quark pair, which happens 56.1% of the time.[48] The second most common fermion decay at that mass is a tau-antitau pair, which happens only about 6% of the time.[48]
Another possibility is for the Higgs to split into a pair of massive gauge bosons. The most likely possibility is for the Higgs to decay into a pair of W bosons (the light blue line in the plot), which happens about 23.1% of the time for a Higgs boson with a mass of 126 GeV/c2.[48] The W bosons can subsequently decay either into a quark and an antiquark or into a charged lepton and a neutrino. However, the decays of W bosons into quarks are difficult to distinguish from the background, and the decays into leptons cannot be fully reconstructed (because neutrinos are impossible to detect in particle collision experiments). A cleaner signal is given by decay into a pair of Z-bosons (which happens about 2.9% of the time for a Higgs with a mass of 126 GeV/c2),[48] if each of the bosons subsequently decays into a pair of easy-to-detect charged leptons (electrons or muons).
Decay into massless gauge bosons (i.e. gluons or photons) is also possible, but requires intermediate loop of virtual heavy quarks (top or bottom) or massive gauge bosons.[49] The most common such process is the decay into a pair of gluons through a loop of virtual heavy quarks. This process, which is the reverse of the gluon fusion process mentioned above, happens approximately 8.5% of the time for a Higgs boson with a mass of 126 GeV/c2.[48] Much rarer is the decay into a pair of photons mediated by a loop of W bosons or heavy quarks, which happens only twice for every thousand decays.[48] However, this process is very relevant for experimental searches for the Higgs boson, because the energy and momentum of the photons can be measured very precisely, giving an accurate reconstruction of the mass of the decaying particle.[49]
Experimental search
Main article: Search for the Higgs boson
To search for the Higgs boson two beams of particles are accelerated to very high energies and aimed to collide in side a particle detector. If one is lucky this results in the production of a Higgs boson through one of the processes discussed above. Because the Higgs boson decays very quickly, the particle detector cannot detect it directly. Instead the detector registers all the decay products (the decay signature) and from the data the decay process is reconstructed. If the observed decay products match a possible decay channel of the Higgs boson, this indicates that a Higgs boson may have been created. In practice, there are many processes that may produce similar decay signatures. Fortunately, the Standard Model precisely predicts the likelihood of each process occurring. So, if the detector detects more decay signatures that could have been a Higgs boson than are predicted by the Standard Model assuming that there is no Higgs boson, then this is strong evidence that the Higgs boson exists.Because the production of a Higgs boson in a particle collision is expected to be very rare (1 in 10 billion at the LHC)[Note 5], and there are many other possible collision events with similar decay signature, the data of hundreds of trillions of collisions needs to be analysed before a conclusion about the existence of the Higgs boson can be reached. To conclude that a new particle has been found, particle physicists require that the statistical analysis of the data of two independent particle detectors each indicate that there is less than a 1 in a million chance that the observed decay signatures are due to just background Standard Model events (i.e. that the observed number of events is more than 5 standard deviations (sigma) away from the expectation if there was no new particle). By accumulating more collision data, the physical properties of the new particle may be inferred, tellings us if the observed particle is indeed the Higgs boson as described by the Standard Model or some other hypothetical new particle.
To find the Higgs boson a particle accelerator powerful enough to create one was needed. Moreover this accelerator needed to produce enough collision (have a high luminosity). Finally, advanced computing facilities were needed to process the vast amount of the data produced by the collisions.[50] For the announcement of 4 July 2012, over 300 trillion (3 x 1014) proton-proton collisions in the LHC with an energy of up to 8 TeV were analyzed by a worldwide network of computing facilities.[50]
Search prior to 4 July 2012
The first extensive search for the Higgs boson was conducted at the Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP) at CERN in the 1990s. At the end of its service in 2000, LEP had found no conclusive evidence for the Higgs.[Note 6] This implied that if the Higgs boson were to exist it would need to be heavier than 114.4 GeV/c2.[51]The search continued at Fermilab in the United States, where the Tevatron—the collider that discovered the top quark in 1995—had the been upgraded for this purpose. Even though, there was no guarantee that the Tevatron would be able to find the Higgs, they hoped to take advantage of the fact it was to only supercollider that was operational, while the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was still under construction. However, the Tevatron was only able to exclude further ranges for the Higgs mass, and was shut down on 30 September 2011 because it could longer keep up with the LHC. The final analysis of the data excluded the possibility of a Higgs boson with a mass between 147 GeV/c2 and 180 GeV/c2. In addition, there was small (but not significant) excess of events possibly indicating a Higgs boson with a mass between 115 GeV/c2–140 GeV/c2.[52]
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland, was designed specifically to be able to either confirm or exclude the existence of the Higgs boson. Build in a 27 km tunnel under the ground near Geneva originally inhabited by LEP, it collides two beams of protons at more than 3.5 TeV each. As on of the most complicated scientific instruments ever built, its operation was delayed multiple times, including a 14 month shut down following a magnet quench event nine days after its inaugural tests caused by a faulty connection that damaged over 50 superconducting magnets and contaminated the vacuum system.[53][54][55]
Data collection at the LHC finally commenced in in March 2010.[56] By December 2011 the two main particle detectors at the LHC, ATLAS and CMS, had narrowed to the mass range were the Higgs could exist to 115–130 GeV. In addition, both experiments were starting to see hints of a new particle that could be the Higgs with a mass around 125 GeV.[57][58] It was therefore widely expected that the LHC would provide sufficient data to either exclude or confirm the existence of the Standard Model Higgs boson by the end of 2012, when their 2012 collision data (at energies of 8 TeV) had been examined.[59]
Discovery of new boson
  |
| Feynman diagrams showing the cleanest channels associated with the Low-Mass, ~125GeV, Higgs Candidate observed by the CMS at the LHC. The dominant production mechanism at this mass involves two gluons from each proton fusing to a Top-quark Loop, which couples strongly to the Higgs Field to produce a Higgs Boson.Left: Diphoton Channel: Boson subsequently decays into 2 gamma ray photons by virtual interaction with a W Boson Loop or Top-quark Loop. Right: 4-Lepton "Golden Channel" Boson emits 2 Z bosons, which each decay into 2 leptons (electrons,muons). Experimental Analysis of these channels reached a significance of 5 sigma.[60][61] The analysis of additional vector boson fusion channels brought the CMS significance to 4.9 sigma.[60][61] |
The two teams had been working 'blinded' from each other for some time[when?], meaning they did not discuss their results with each other, providing additional certainty that any common finding was genuine validation of a particle.[50] This level of evidence, confirmed independently by two separate teams and experiments, meets the formal level of proof required to announce a confirmed discovery. CERN have been cautious, and stated only that the new particle is "consistent with" the Higgs boson, but scientists have not yet positively identified it as being the Higgs boson, pending further data collection and analysis.[1]
On July 31 2012, the ATLAS collaboration presented additional data analysis on the "observation of a new particle", including data from a third channel, which improved the significance to 5.9 sigma (1 in 588 million chance of being due to random background effects) and mass 126 ± 0.4 (stat) ± 0.4 (sys) GeV/c2,[3] and CMS improved the significance to 5 sigma and mass 125.3 ± 0.4 (stat) ± 0.5 (sys) GeV/c2.[2]
So far the observations are consistent with the observed particle being the Standard Model Higgs boson. The particle decays into at least some of the predicted channels. Moreover, the production rates and branching ratios for the observed channels match the predictions by the Standard Model within the experimental uncertainties. However, the experimental uncertainties currently still leave room for alternative explanations. It is therefore too early to conclude that the found particle is indeed the Standard Model Higgs.[49]
Further confirmation will require more precise data on some of the characteristic of the new particle, including its other decay channels and various quantum numbers such as its parity. To allow for further data gathering, the current LHC proton-proton collision run has been extended by seven weeks, delaying the planned long shutdown for upgrades in 2013. It is hoped that this extra data will allow a more conclusive statement on the nature of the new particle in December.[70]
In mainstream media
The Higgs boson is often referred to as the "God particle" by individuals outside the scientific community, after the title of Nobel Physics prizewinner Leon Lederman's popular science book on particle physics, The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? (1993)[13] While use of this term may have contributed to increased media interest,[71] many scientists dislike it, [10] [11][72] since it is sensational and overstates the particle's importance. Its discovery would still leave unanswered questions about the unification of quantum chromodynamics, the electroweak interaction, and gravity, as well as the ultimate origin of the universe. Higgs, an atheist himself, is displeased that the Higgs particle is nicknamed the "God particle",[73] because the term "might offend people who are religious".[74]In explaining his choice of nickname for the particle, Lederman begins by recounting the long human search for knowledge, commenting:
- "Today ... we have the standard model, which reduces all of reality to a dozen or so particles and four forces. ... It's a hard-won simplicity [...and...] remarkably accurate. But it is also incomplete and, in fact, internally inconsistent... This boson is so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our final understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive, that I have given it a nickname: the God Particle. Why God Particle? Two reasons. One, the publisher wouldn't let us call it the Goddamn Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing. And two, there is a connection, of sorts, to another book, a much older one..." [13]:22
A renaming competition conducted by the science correspondent for the British Guardian newspaper chose the name "the champagne bottle boson" as the best from among their submissions: "The bottom of a champagne bottle is in the shape of the Higgs potential and is often used as an illustration in physics lectures. So it's not an embarrassingly grandiose name, it is memorable, and [it] has some physics connection too."[76] The alternative name of higgson was suggested in an opinion piece in "physicsworld.com", an online publication of the IOP.[77]
Following reported observation of the Higgs-like particle in July 2012, several Indian media outlets reported on the supposed neglect of credit to Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose after whose work in the 1920s the class of particles "bosons" is named,[78] although physicists have described Bose's connection to the discovery as tenuous.[79]