Abstract
The 40 years old Standard Model, the theory of particle physics, seems to describe all experimental data very well. The theory is based on symmetries, some of them are broken, mostly by the weak interaction. All of its elementary particles were identified and studied apart from the Higgs boson until 2012, when the two main experiments of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, CMS and ATLAS observed a new particle with properties close to those predicted for the Higgs boson. The discovery of the Higgs boson proves the validity of the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking and Francois Englert and Peter Higgs received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics. There are several questions yet concerning the possible theoretical significance of the mass of the new particle.
Highlights
The 40 years old Standard Model, the theory of particle physics, seems to describe all experimental data very well
Statistics played a rough joke at LEP: one of the experiments, ALEPH, saw a very significant signal corresponding to a Higgs boson of a mass of 115 GeV/c2, while the rest of LEP did not see anything.[8]
It was a joke of statistics that in July 2012 adding together two decay channels, H → γγ and H → 4 gave the same 5σ significance for both ATLAS and CMS whereas adding to it the WW channel increased the significance to 6σ for ATLAS and adding all channels together reduced it to 4.9σ for CMS
Summary
The Standard Model, the general theory of particle physics was established more than 40 years ago. Local gauge symmetries give correct answers to important questions except the mass of elementary particles: one has to violate them in order to introduce their masses. This spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) was introduced in several steps to particle physics and it is an integral part of the Standard Model. It was published in 1964 by several people independently,[1] but it is called BEH mechanism after Brout, Englert and Higgs, its first inventors. Note that the masses of our macroscopic world are mostly due to the energy content of the proton and the neutron and not due to the BEH mechanism
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