Higgs boson (h
gz)
A hypothetical, massive subatomic particle with zero electric charge. The Higgs boson is postulated to interact with other particles in such a way as to impart mass to them. It is predicted by the standard model, but has yet to be isolated experimentally. The Higgs boson is named after its discoverer, British theoretical physicist Peter Ware Higgs (born 1929).
The American Heritage® Science Dictionary Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. ll rights reserved.
boson [ˈbəʊzɒn]
n.
Any of a class of particles, such as the photon, pion, or alpha particle, that have zero or integral spin and obey statistical rules permitting any number of identical particles to occupy the same quantum state. [After Satyendra Nath Bose.]
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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Peter Higgs This photo belongs to UCL News (Flickr photo)/ Photo taken September 6, 2010.Description
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Peter Ware Higgs, FRS, FRSE, FKC (born 29 May 1929), is a British theoretical physicist and anemeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh.
He is best known for his 1960s proposal of broken symmetry in electroweak theory, explaining the origin of mass of elementary particles in general and of the W and Z bosons in particular. This so-called Higgs mechanism, which had several inventors besides Higgs at about the same time, predicts the existence of a new particle, the Higgs boson (often described as "the most sought-after particle in modern physics"). Although this particle has not turned up in acceleratorexperiments so far, the Higgs mechanism is generally accepted as an important ingredient in the Standard Model of particle physics, without which particles would have no mass.
Prof. Higgs has been honoured with a number of awards in recognition of his work, including the 1997 Dirac Medal and Prize for outstanding contributions to theoretical physics from the Institute of Physics, the 1997 High Energy and Particle Physics Prize by the European Physical Society, the 2004 Wolf Prize in Physics, and the 2010 J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics.
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