Peter Higgs
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| Peter Higgs | |
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| Born | 29 May 1929 Newcastle upon Tyne, England |
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| Nationality | United Kingdom |
| Fields | Physics |
| Alma mater | King's College London |
| Known for | Broken symmetry in electroweak theory |
| Notable awards | Wolf Prize in Physics (2004) Dirac Medal |
Peter Ware Higgs, FRS, FRSE, (born May 29, 1929), is an emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh.
Higgs 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, predicts the existence of a new particle, the Higgs boson (often described as "the most sought-after particle in modern physics"[1] [2]). Although this particle has not turned up in accelerator experiments so far, the Higgs mechanism is generally accepted as an important ingredient in the Standard Model of particle physics otherwise particles would have no mass [3]. Higgs conceived of the mechanism in 1964 while walking the Cairngorms, and returned to his lab declaring he had his "one big idea".
Higgs has been awarded a number of awards in recognition of his work, including the 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, and the 2004 Wolf Prize in Physics.
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[edit] Early life and education
Higgs was born in Newcastle upon Tyne.[4] His father was a sound engineer with the BBC, and as a result of childhood asthma, together with the family moving around because of his father's job, and later the Second World War, Higgs missed some early schooling and was taught at home. When his father relocated to Bedford, Higgs stayed behind with his mother in Bristol, and was largely raised there. He attended that city's Cotham Grammar School,[5] where he was inspired by the work of one of the school's alumni, Paul Dirac, who founded the field of quantum mechanics.[4]
At the age of 17, Higgs moved to City of London School, where he specialized in mathematics, then to King's College London where he graduated with a first class honours degree in Physics, a masters degree and then a PhD. He became a Senior Research Fellow at the Edinburgh University, then held various posts at University College London and Imperial College London before becoming a temporary lecturer in Mathematics at University College London. He returned to Edinburgh University in 1960 to take up the post of Lecturer in Mathematical physics, allowing him to settle in the city he had fallen in love with after hitch-hiking to the Edinburgh Fringe festival as a student.
[edit] Theoretical work in Physics
It was at Edinburgh that he first became interested in mass, developing the idea that particles were weightless when the universe began, acquiring mass a fraction of a second later, as a result of interacting with a theoretical field now known as the Higgs field. Higgs postulated that this field permeates space, giving all elementary subatomic particles that interact with it their mass.[4][6] While the Higgs field is postulated to confer mass on quarks and leptons, it represents only a tiny portion of the masses of other subatomic particles, such as protons and neutrons. In these, gluons that bind quarks together confer most of the particle mass.
The original basis of Higgs' work came from the Japanese-Born American theorist Yoichiro Nambu, from the University of Chicago. Professor Nambu had proposed a theory known as Spontaneous symmetry breaking based on what was known to happen in Superconductivity in condensed matter. However, the theory predicted predicted massless particles (the Goldstone's theorem) which results were clearly not observed in experiments.
Higgs wrote a short paper evading the Goldstone's theorem and it was published in Physics Letters, a European physics journal and edited at CERN in 1964.
Higgs wrote a second paper describing a theoretical model (the Higgs mechanism) but the paper was rejected (the editors felt that "it was of no obvious relevance to physics"). Higgs wrote an extra paragraph and sent his paper to Physical Review Letters, a leading American physics journal where it was published later that year. Two Belgian Physicists Robert Brout and Francois Englert at the Université Libre de Bruxelles had reached the same conclusion independently about the same time and the previous year the American physicist Philip Warren Anderson had also questioned the Goldstone's theorem.
Higgs is reported to be displeased that the particle is nicknamed the "God particle", as Higgs is an atheist.[7]This nickname for the Higgs boson is usually attributed to Leon Lederman, but it is actually the result of Lederman's publisher's censoring. Originally Lederman intended to call it the goddamn particle because of its elusiveness.
Higgs was promoted to a personal chair of Theoretical Physics at Edinburgh in 1980. He became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1983 and a fellow of the Institute of Physics in 1991. He retired in 1996 and became Emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh.
It is expected that the Large Hadron Collider which is planned to open at CERN in Switzerland in late 2008 will have the best chance of finding the Higgs boson because it is the biggest and highest energy Particle accelerator built to date. If the Higgs boson is found at CERN (ironically, home to the editor who famously rejected his initial paper) Professor Higgs may be awarded the Nobel Prize [8].
[edit] Notes
- ^ Griffiths, Martin (20070501) physicsworld.com The Tale of the Blog's Boson Retrieved on 2008-05-27
- ^ Fermilab Today (20050616) Fermilab Results of the Week. Top Quarks are Higgs' best Friend Retrieved on 2008-05-27
- ^ Rincon, Paul (20040310) Fermilab 'God Particle' may have been seen Retrieved on 2008-05-27
- ^ a b c Sample, Ian. "The god of small things", The Guardian, November 17, 2007, weekend section.
- ^ The Cotham Grammar School building now houses Cotham School, a specialist performing arts school.
- ^ "Higgs particle", Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2007.
- ^ Key scientist sure "God particle" will be found soon Reuters news story. 7 April 2008.
- ^ “The Missing Piece” Page 17
[edit] References
- "The Missing Piece" by Jessica Griggs from Edit the University of Edinburgh Alumni Magazine Summer 2008, Pages 16-17
[edit] External links
- Google Scholar List of Papers by PW Higgs
- A photograph of Peter Higgs, Photographs of Peter Higgs, June 2008,
- Peter Higgs: the man behind the boson - An article in the PhysicsWeb about Peter Higgs
- Higgs v Hawking: a battle of the heavyweights that has shaken the world of theoretical physics - An article on the debate between Peter Higgs and Stephen Hawking about the existence of the Higgs boson
- My Life as a Boson - A Lecture by Peter Higgs available in various formats
- blog of an interview
