Ramanujan Auditorium

What is the Higgs? — What is it for?

Tom Kibble

Imperial College, UK

The Higgs boson is predicted by the Higgs mechanism, an essential part of the standard model of particle physics. This talk is intended to explain where the idea came from. I shall start by describing the state of particle physics just after the second world war, including the development of quantum electrodynamics and renormalization theory. Then I will talk about the idea of a gauge theory, and about the search for unification, in particular for a unified theory of weak and electromagnetic interactions. I shall describe the obstacles to unification, notably the Goldstone theorem, which seemed to predict unwanted and unobserved particles, and the way in which these were removed when the Higgs mechanism was discovered, paving the way for the development of the unified electroweak theory by Steven Weinberg and, at Imperial College London, by Abdus Salam. Finally I will discuss the significance of the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN.