Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The hypothetical mechanism in quantum mechanics by which certain particles interact with the Higgs field and thereby have the property of mass.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun physics The proposed interaction between
elementary particles and theHiggs field that imbues the particles with mass and breaks theelectroweak symmetry.
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") + mechanism; after the British physicist Peter Higgs, who is credited with its discovery.
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