Context: Recently, physicists working with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle-smasher at CERN has detected a Higgs boson decaying into a Z boson particle and a photon.

About Higgs Boson

• The Higgs boson is a type of boson or a force-carrying subatomic particle.

• The Higgs boson carries the force that a particle experiences when it moves through an energy field, called the Higgs field.

• Higgs field is present throughout the universe.

• Example: when an electron interacts with the Higgs field, the effects it experiences are caused due to its interaction with Higgs bosons.

• The stronger a particle’s interaction with the Higgs boson, the more mass it has.

• This differentiates the mass of electrons, protons and neutrons.

• This helps determine the mass of particles.

• A Higgs boson can also interact with another Higgs boson.

• Photons, the particles of light, have no mass as they don’t interact with Higgs bosons.

• The Higgs boson is an unstable particle that decays into lighter particles, the lighter particles cannot be known previously. 

• The Standard Model predicts that the Higgs boson will decay into Z boson 0.1% of the time if its mass is 125 billion eV/c2 (a unit of mass used for subatomic particles).

What are virtual particles?

• Virtual particles are particles that quickly pop in and out of existence in the space.

• According to quantum field theory, space at the subatomic level is not empty rather they are filled with virtual particles.

• Virtual particles can’t be detected directly, but sometimes their effects can last long.

• The LHC creates a Higgs boson by accelerating many highly energetic protons into a head-on collision.

• When a Higgs boson is created, it interacts with virtual particles that creates a Z boson and a photon.

Key findings of the research

• A Higgs boson decayed into a Z boson and a photon 0.1% of the time. 

• Z boson is also unstable and decays many times into two muons, another subatomic particle.

Significance of the research

• It will help to tell the conditions required to produce certain type of subatomic particles from the decay of the Higgs boson.

• It will help validate the Standard Model of physics which can then be used to prove other scientific theories.