The Higgs boson, also known as the God particle, is a hypothetical massive scalar elementary particlepredicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics. It is the only Standard Model particle not yet observed (with the exception of the Graviton), but plays a key role in explaining the origins of the mass of other elementary particles, in particular the difference between the massless photon and the relatively heavy W and Z bosons. Elementary particle masses, and the differences between electromagnetism (caused by the photon) and the weak force (caused by the W and Z bosons), are critical to many aspects of the structure of microscopic (and hence macroscopic) matter; thus, if it exists, the Higgs boson has an enormous effect on the world around us.
As of 2007, no experiment has directly detected the existence of the Higgs boson, but there is indirect evidence for it. The Higgs mechanism, which gives mass to vector bosons, was first theorized in 1964 byPeter Higgs, François Englert and Robert Brout, working from the ideas of Philip Anderson, and independently by G. S. Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, and T. W. B. Kibble [1]. Higgs proposed that the existence of a massive scalar particle could be a test of the theory, a remark added to his Physical Review letter [2] at the suggestion of the referee [3]. Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam were the first to apply the Higgs mechanism to the electroweak symmetry breaking. The electroweak theory predicts a neutral particle whose mass is not far from the W and Z bosons.
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