Tulisan ini adalah jawaban dari Prof. David Miller (UCL, London) ketika Science Minister-nya Inggris, William Waldegrave, menulis pertanyaan dalam secarik kertas: “What is the Higgs boson, and why do we want to find it?”
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Politics, Solid State and the Higgs
1. The Higgs Mechanism
Imagine a cocktail party of political party workers who are uniformly distributed across the floor, all talking to their nearest neighbours. The ex-Prime- Minister enters and crosses the room. All of the workers in her neighbourhood are strongly attracted to her and cluster round her. As she moves she attracts the people she comes close to, while the ones she has left return to their even spacing. Because of the knot of people always clustered around her she acquires a greater mass than normal, that is, she has more momentum for the same speed of movement across the room. Once moving she is harder to stop, and once stopped she is harder to get moving again because the clustering process has to be restarted. In three dimensions, and with the complications of relativity, this is the Higgs mechanism. In order to give particles mass, a background field is invented which becomes locally distorted whenever a particle moves through it. The distortion – the clustering of the field around the particle – generates the particle’s mass. The idea comes directly from the Physics of Solids. Instead of a field spread throughout all space a solid contains a lattice of positively charged crystal atoms. When an electron moves through the lattice the atoms are attracted to it, causing the electron’s effective mass to be as much as 40 times bigger than the mass of a free electron. The postulated Higgs field in the vacuum is a sort of hypothetical lattice which fills our Universe. We need it because otherwise we cannot explain why the Z and W particles which carry the Weak Interactions are so heavy while the photon which carries Electromagnetic forces is massless.
2. The Higgs Boson.
Now consider a rumour passing through our room full of uniformly spread political workers. Those near the door hear of it first and cluster together to get the details, then they turn and move closer to their next neighbours who want to know about it too. A wave of clustering passes through the room. It may spread out to all the corners, or it may form a compact bunch which carries the news along a line of workers from the door to some dignitary at the other side of the room. Since the information is carried by clusters of people, and since it was clustering which gave extra mass to the ex-Prime Minister, then the rumour-carrying clusters also have mass. The Higgs boson is predicted to be just such a clustering in the Higgs field. We will find it much easier to believe that the field exists, and that the mechanism for giving other particles mass is true, if we actually see the Higgs particle itself. Again, there are analogies in the Physics of Solids. A crystal lattice can carry waves of clustering without needing an electron to move and attract the atoms. These waves can behave as if they are particles. They are called phonons, and they too are bosons. There could be a Higgs mechanism, and a Higgs field throughout our Universe, without there being a Higgs boson. The next generation of colliders will sort this out.
Sumber: HEP Group, Dept of Physics & Astronomy, University College London. (Klik disini untuk artikel aslinya)
Feel I have found the Higgs with my new physics theory- I can tell you that I find the mass of the photon to be one divided by Planck’s constant (h) in terms of the number of Higgs particles in helical wave string tandem that it takes to mark one world line around the spinning R-size photon material point. That is, the outer spin surface of R is populated with 1/h-cubed G-size Higgs particles as the Mass of the Surface of the R-volume. Mass is thus a spin surface quality not a volume marking quality. Dimensional homogeneity and physics in general needs to start over. The Bohr model of the atom is grossly incorrect and Einstein’s space curvature equation in the simple algebra form that longed for but never found is G = R/3(v-squared), or the replacement sphere radius of the photon material point divided by its 3-axis energy– for simplest 3-D pre-geometry per the great book of Einstein’s Legacy, “Gravitation” by Misner, Thorne and Wheeler. Let the electron have a constant mass of h grams ANDBE A HELICAL STRING WAVE OF 1/h-squared HIGGS PARTICLE–THEN LET 1/h elecrons be one unit of mass, then the photon mass is h-cubed grams. and the quantum wave is synonymous with the photon wave and they both have the same mass.
Waduh… gak mudeng… pake istilah “kuasi” segala.
Lulusan UI kayaknya makin mantep aja nih tuk urusan fisika teoretik… di ITB makin sedikit yang minat.