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Higgs Excitation, What the hell is a Higgs Excitation?

Posted on April 3, 2009

This seems like it would be funny if i knew what Higgs Excitation was!
What the hell is a Higgs Excitation?
Higgs Excitation?
Someone make a Wikipedia page so I know what it is.
I would suspect that a Higgs Excitation is just another way of saying a Higgs Boson, i.e. an excitation of the Higgs field.

But I haven’t done particle physics in a while.
But it’s not really the point of the comic to know what a Higgs excitation is. Probably.

Higgs boson

The Higgs boson field is the mechanism which extends the Standard Model to explain how particles acquire the properties associated with mass. The Higgs boson is the exchange particle in this field; it has not yet been discovered. Theorists estimate that accelerator energies of around 1TeV are the minimum required to detect the Higgs. Thus there is some chance that the Higgs will be found in Run II of the Tevatron at Fermilab. More likely, the Higgs will be discovered and studied when the Large Hadron Collider comes online at CERN in or after 2005.

The two links below give, first, a simple model for understanding the Higgs mechanism and, second, a set of illustrations consistent with that model.

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