Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A hypothetical quantum field postulated to explain the property of mass in elementary particles. Higgs bosons arise as excitations of the Higgs field by other particles.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun physics A theoretical
field associated withelectroweak symmetry breaking, thequantum of which is theHiggs boson ; interaction with this field is hypothesised to giveelementary particles their mass.
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
[After Peter Ware Higgs, (born 1929), British physicist.]
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
From Higgs ("a surname") + field; after the British physicist Peter Higgs, who is credited with proposing what is now called the Higgs mechanism.
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