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#HiggsBoson
#OriginOfMass
In this video we will look at the infamous Higgs field! This is the field proposed by Peter Higgs in 1964 as part of the Higgs mechanism which we discussed in the previous video. The Higgs field is the field associated with the Higgs boson, the particle responsible for giving masses to all the fermions of the standard model. While the Higgs field and boson were proposed in 1964 and in the following years became a cornerstone of the standard model, it took almost half a century to discover this particle. One of the reasons is that the Higgs particle is one of the heaviest fundamental particles we know about at 125 GeV, only surpassed by the mass of the top quark at 173 GeV. The heavier the particle is the more energy is required to find it, but there can also be other reasons why particles can be hard to discover. Making experiments with higher energies requires bigger machines, and so far only one such machine, namely the Large Hadron Collider, LHC at CERN in Geneva is able to produce it. It is also the place where the discovery was announced in 2012 after 48 years since the Higgs boson was first hypothesized.
Why is the Higgs boson important? We discussed the importance of the Higgs field in relation to the Higgs Mechanism, which is part of the electroweak theory that explains why the weak force bosons have mass and why the photon is massless. But the question still remains, why do the fermions have mass? If we look at the standard model, we see that all the quarks and leptons are massive. In a similar way to gauge bosons not being allowed to be massive, we also can't just add masses to the fermions. When I say fermions I refer to the quarks and leptons, and leptons include particles like the electron and neutrinos. The issue is similar to that of the gauge bosons, the symmetry group of the standard model simply prohibits us from writing a mass term like in the Lagrangian of QED or like in the Dirac Equation. In QED it works because we have a simpler symmetry group, but for the standard model we cannot just write a mass term. Thus without some clever mechanism, all particles of the standard model would be massless. This is what we will discuss more in this video.
![](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/sfuOXUn1fGE/maxresdefault.jpg)