God particle ! Nobel laureate Peter Higgs is no more !

Remember reading about ‘God particle’ !  -  On April 8, 2024,  the man  who first theorized the existence of the same, passed away at the age of 94. His passing was announced on April 10.

The Higgs boson is the fundamental force-carrying particle of the Higgs field, which is responsible for granting other particles their mass. This field was first proposed in the mid-sixties by Peter Higgs and was named after him. The particle was finally discovered on July 4, 2012, by researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — the most powerful particle accelerator in the world — located at the European particle physics laboratory CERN, Switzerland.

The LHC confirmed the existence of the Higgs field and the mechanism that gives rise to mass and thus completed the standard model of particle physics  —  the best description we have of the subatomic world. The Higgs boson, sometimes called the Higgs particle, is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics produced by the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, one of the fields in particle physics theory. The Higgs field is a scalar field with two neutral and two electrically charged components that form a complex doublet of the weak isospin SU(2) symmetry. Its "Sombrero potential" leads it to take a nonzero value everywhere  .. .. … ……..

Particle physics or high-energy physics is the study of fundamental particles and forces that constitute matter and radiation. The field also studies combinations of elementary particles up to the scale of protons and neutrons, while the study of combination of protons and neutrons is called nuclear physics.The fundamental particles in the universe are classified in the Standard Model as fermions (matter particles) and bosons (force-carrying particles).

I do not understand most of whatever is above, the name reminded me of the leg spinner who played in that Chepauk test in Sept 1979 when a 32 year old bespectacled Dilip Doshi made his debut.  It was arain affected match and a decisive result was not possible. This Higgs played in that Test and also in that Melbourne Test of 1981, much remembered for the Kapil 5 wickets and the second innings collapse of Greg Chappel Aussies.

Peter Ware Higgs CH FRS FRSE HonFInstP was a British theoretical physicist, professor at the University of Edinburgh, and Nobel laureate in Physics for his work on the mass of subatomic particles.

In 1964, Higgs was the single author of one of the three milestone papers published in Physical Review Letters (PRL) that proposed that spontaneous symmetry breaking in electroweak theory could explain the origin of mass of elementary particles in general and of the W and Z bosons in particular. This Higgs mechanism predicted the existence of a new particle, the Higgs boson, the detection of which became one of the great goals of physics. In 2012, CERN announced the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider.The Higgs mechanism is generally accepted as an important ingredient in the Standard Model of particle physics, without which certain particles would have no mass. For this work, Higgs received the Nobel Prize in Physics which he shared with François Englert in 2013.

On 8 October 2013, it was announced that Higgs and François Englert would share the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles", and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider". Higgs admitted he had gone out to avoid the media attention so he was informed he had been awarded the prize by an ex-neighbour on his way home, since he did not have a mobile phone.

Higgs turned down a knighthood in 1999, but in 2012, he accepted membership of the Order of the Companions of Honour. He later said that he only accepted the order because he was wrongly assured that the award was the gift of the Queen alone. He also expressed cynicism toward the honours system, and the way the system "is used for political purposes by the government in power". The order confers no title or precedence, but recipients of the order are entitled to use the post-nominal letters CH. 

With the introduction of World Series Cricket,  there were many opportunities  in the Australian team, especially for the spin bowling spot, as Kerry O'Keefe, Ashley Mallett and Ray Bright were all banned and no longer considered available for selection. James Donald Higgs (Jim Higgs) took 6–131 against the touring Indians, pushed him to limelight, however Tony Mann was selected instead. Mann kept his place for the first four tests before being replaced by Bruce Yardley in the fifth. Both were better batsmen than Higgs, later Higgs was picked on the tour to the West Indies as the second spinner apart from Yardley.  Jim Higgs ended up playing 22  tests between 1978 and 1981. In the words of Gideon Haigh "Jim Higgs was Australia's best leg-spinner between Richie Benaud and Warne. His misfortune was to play at a time when wrist-spin was nearly extinct.

With regards – S Sampathkumar
16^th Apr 2024.