Precise W Boson Mass Measurement Helps Lead the Way To the Higgs Boson 82
New submitter SchrodingerZ writes "'The world's most precise measurement of the mass of the W Boson, one of nature's elementary particles, has been achieved by scientists from the CDF and DZero collaborations at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.' This new number (80387 +- 17 MeV/c^2) puts more constraint on the mass of the theorized Higgs Boson, which is theorized to give mass to all other things, supporting the standard model. 'Scientists employ two techniques to find the hiding place of the Higgs particle: the direct production of Higgs particles and precision measurements of other particles and forces that could be influenced by the existence of a Higgs particle.'"
Re:Where does the Higgs mass come from? (Score:2, Interesting)
This is a misunderstanding and misexplanation. What happens is that "Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking" gives particles their mass. The vacuum lowest energy ) state of must obey the same symmetry. Usually this is not a problem because the symmetry maps the vacuum state into itself. However with gauge symmetries this is not generally the case. Instead there are a set of states which are all symmetric to the each other as a vacuum. For the dynamics to be determined uniquely a vacuum state must be chosen. The process of chosing the vacuum state breaks the symmetry. ( Put another way the Universe evolves in a way which respects the symmetry, but the starting conditions for the Universe cannot possibly obey the symmetry, so it is broken. )
Spontaneous symmetry breaking generates two artifacts. One is the particle essentially interacting with itself at the ground state. This is the mass of the particle.
The other is the particle oscillating between different ground states. This gives rise to the Higgs.
So in essence particle mass and the Higgs are both artifacts of Spontaneous Symmmetry Breaking.