Sci-Fi or Fact or somewhere in the middle?
The peculiar experimental challenge about the Higgs field is that it can extract its quanta from certain physical states (certain initial conditions in a particle physics reaction) only at very high energy and with low probability, but that is true also for other particles. Its truly peculiar thing is that the presence of the Higgs field, in addition to the fields of all other particles that we know of, explains why quanta in general have a mass (although this is not clear for neutrinos) through a mechanism where the Higgs field interacts with the quanta of other particles.
"In the jargon of field theory, physicists often say that “virtual particles” can briefly and spontaneously appear from the vacuum and then disappear again, even when no one has put enough energy into the field to create a real particle. But what they really mean is that the vacuum itself has random and indelible fluctuations, and sometimes their influence can be felt by the way they kick around real particles."
I can't help but immediately question every jargon word I see, especially "random", "particle" and "wave".
Im my experience, all terms in physics (like "particle", "wave", "energy") are highly context dependent and most PhDs could spend hours debating what is actually meant in a given case. Such discussions almost never lead to publishable results and are thus considered a waste of time, or leasure at best.
Usually, you just "shut up and calculate". Meanwhile, the calculations are motivated by "intuition", which involves combining known or unknown reasonable approximations with a basic theory. This process is never explained systematically and rather the hope is that it will be absorbed via osmosis by the brighter students.
It turns out, you actually don't need to have a coherent concept of "what a particle is" to perform particle physics experiments and evaluate the data. Sometimes, when pressed, operational definitions can be offered. For example, I've heard a professor say: "a particle is defined as a bump at a given energy in this plot". I'm not sure how ironic that was supposed to sound...
Think its the other way around really.
Decades of contradictory analogies and false intuitions later and "shut up and calculate" is still the best way to understand it.
A field's normal vibration is like plucking a guitar string. A quantum is like shaking the end of a rope and seeing a ripple fly down it.
Solitons are self re-enforcing wave packets in some medium, where the dispersive effects get canceled out. I like to think of field quanta as being similar at a very high handwavy level. Of course the trick with quanta is only certain energy levels are allowed.
You can also create bona-fide Higgs particles, but you have to put in a lot of energy to do it (like the LHC does), and it will proceed to immediately disintegrate into lighter particles, which is what the LHC is observing in detectors
I think that when particles use the Higgs field to get their mass, the virtual particle is only a temporary ripple living on borrowed time, so it can interract with other fields but has to go back to nothing when the interaction is over, like a local variable in a function.
When you have a real Higgs, if it decays into say two photons, then yes you have a wave in the Higgs field dissipating, while equal energy/charge/<other conserved quantities...> waves replace it in other fields
(IANAP. This does not constitute physical advice.)
Physicist here: nope. The coupling between the Higgs field and other particle fields is what creates the phenomona of mass. The Higgs particle is just an excitation of that field.
Virtual particles aren't "real" in the same way that the first order Taylor series of sin(x) being x doesn't max x a real sinusoidal wave. All it does is let you make your calculations "close enough" for your accepted definition of "close enough."
Is it fair to say that both virtual Higgs and 'real' Higgs are two types of excitations of that field, except that virtual particles can't be directly observed?
I find the name virtual particles interesting, since they don't seem to be exactly the same kind of ripples as particles, and physicists frequently seem to disagree on how 'real' they are as a matter of interpretation
They are great for trying to help human brains make concrete the details of the process. But again they are just artifacts of the way we do our computations.
And the Higgs field is a particularly great example of this. If you shift a sin wave 90 degrees it becomes a cosine wave. If you don’t expand about the lowest energy of the Mexican top hot potential for the Higgs field it creates an entirely different description of the physical phenomena and virtual particles.
To save someone else the trouble, no, that wasn't an autocorrect mistake on "Mexican."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_symmetry_breakin...
> Also a countertop swivel chair physicist, my understanding is that Higgs bosons are recruited as virtual particles all the time to bestow other particles their mass.
I think you're mixing up two subtle ideas. One is virtual particles, which as lanza explains, is really a name for a step in a calculation. The other is the idea of vacuum expectation value, or vev.
As another commenter mentioned, a particle is (loosely) like a ripple on a pond. The vev tells you how much water there is, even at rest. With a simple harmonic potential (parabola shaped) the vev is the x-coordinate of the turning point (ie. the minimal energy), which we usually put at zero because of symmetry. However, the 'Mexican hat potential' respects the symmetry but has minima that aren't located at zero radius. The Higgs potential is like that, and so the Higgs has a nonzero vev.
The way the Higgs interacts with fermions implies that the masses are proportional to the Higgs vev.
Rather than it being virtual Higgses, it's more like the particles are swimming in a viscous liquid. Sleek particles aren't bothered and are hardly slowed down at all (these particles have not much mass) and some are not hydrodynamic and have a hard time.
The analogy is imperfect: the viscous soup doesn't provide friction in the way that water does (you can't give your momentum to the vacuum).
Eh. That's like saying fully constructed lego kits don't exist under normal conditions. Yea sure, my normal life conditions don't entail me having just finished putting together a lego rollercoaster. But calling that "normal conditions" is a weird way of describing the situation.
I'm being kinda nitpicky, but as a physicist who understands the phenomena I'd just definitely never say "under normal conditions" here. The LHC just provides more potential interactions in a highly regular way and thus more opportunities to measure it.
The Higgs boson is just heavy and unstable and less probabilistic to be created via most particle interactions.
> So Higgs particles don't exist under normal conditions, they're just proof that the Higgs field exists and explains how mass exists
This Higgs particle doesn't explain how mass exists. The construction that explains how mass works predicts that a Higgs boson exists.
I think there's a better and perhaps clearer to understand interpretation here: All particles have an invariant mass, inherent to the particle itself, and a momentum, which is, roughly related to velocity in matter and frequency in photons (but not quite!). These together determine the energy a particle has.
Some particles are long-lived and some are short-lived. The Higgs boson is short-lived. In these collisions, it really does exist for a period of time, however, it decays to smaller particles with an total energy that equals the energy of the original Higgs boson. The ATLAS detector detects these long-lived stable particles.
The phenomenon you are attempting to explain is particle decay (why the Higgs boson decays into other particles). I never heard of inter-field energy dissipation as a cause for particle decay, but it seems really interesting. However, I don't really understand what "inter-field energy dissipation" means. They are all very theoretical terms to me.
I am comfortable with hand-waving it as "particles decay because they decay, because that's the way the laws of physics work, and it's allowed because the resulting state is of higher entropy". It seems like it is a phenomenon that is very hard to explain.
https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-ph...
https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/the-higgs-p...
The hard part being to isolate it and get it in an "observable" condition where you can actually see it.