“God Particle”
What is the Higgs boson and the Higgs field?
The Higgs field has been described as a kind of cosmic "treacle" spread through the universe.
According to Prof Higgs's 1964 theory, the field interacts with the tiny particles that make up atoms, and weighs them down so that they do not simply whizz around space at the speed of light.
But in the half-century following the theory, produced independently by the six scientists within a few months of each other, nobody has been able to prove that the Higgs Field really exists.
Prof Higgs predicted that the field would have a signature particle, a massive boson.
What would the world be like without the Higgs boson?
According to the Standard Model theory, it would not be recognisable. Without something to give mass to the basic building blocks of matter, everything would behave as light does, floating freely and not combining with other particles. Ordinary matter, as we know it, would not exist.
How long has the search gone on?
Scientists have been looking for the Higgs since the 1960s, but the search began in earnest more than 20 years ago with early experiments at Cern in Europe and Fermilab in the US.
Does finding the Higgs boson mark the end of the search?
It's just the end of the beginning. Confirming the existence of the Higgs would only be the start of a new era of particle physics as scientists focus on understanding how it works and look for unexpected phenomena.
How do you find a Higgs boson?
To find the particle and characterise it, scientists must first try to create it by smashing beams of protons together inside the Large Hadron Collider at close to the speed of light and analysing the debris.
By doing so they will essentially be recreating a very small model of the state of the Universe as it was in the first trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.
Some of the fragments released by the collision should in theory be Higgs Bosons, although they will instantly deteriorate into even smaller, more stable subatomic particles.
Like other heavy particles, the Higgs decays into lighter particles, which then decay into even lighter ones. The process can follow a certain number of paths, which depend on the particle's mass.
Physicists compare the decay paths they observe after a particle collision to predicted decay paths simulated with computers. When a match is found, it suggests that the observed particle is the one being searched for.
How is the Higgs boson related to the Big Bang?
About 13.7 billion years ago, the Big Bang gave birth to the universe and caused an outburst of massless particles and radiation energy. Scientists think that fractions of a second later, part of the radiation energy congealed into the Higgs field.
When the universe began to cool, particles acquired mass from the Higgs field, slowed down and began to bunch up to form composite particles and, eventually, atoms.
Conditions present a billionth of a second after the Big Bang are recreated in the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator near Geneva.
How did the Higgs boson get the nickname "the God particle"?
A Nobel laureate physicist from Fermilab called Leon Lederman wrote a book in the early 1990s about the search for the Higgs boson. His publishers coined the name as a marketable title for the book, but it's disliked by many scientists.

“States of Matter”
Low-energy states
Classical states
Solid: A solid holds a rigid shape without a container.
Amorphous solid: A solid in which there is no long-range order of the positions of the atoms.
Crystalline solid: A solid in which the constituent atoms, molecules, or ions are packed in a r egularly ordered, repeating pattern.
Plastic crystal: A molecular solid with long-range positional order but with constituent molecules retaining rotational freedom.
Quasicrystal: A solid in which the positions of the atoms have long-range order, but is not in a repeating pattern.
Liquid: A mostly non-compressible fluid. Able to conform to the shape of its container but retaining a (nearly) constant volume independent of pressure.
Liquid crystal: Properties intermediate between liquids and crystals. Generally, able to flow like a liquid but exhibiting long-range order.
Disordered Hyperuniformity: It behaves like a crystal and a liquid. The density of particles over large distances is the same like a crystal. It is also a liquid in the sense that at smaller distances, the particles display same physical properties in all directions.
Gas: A compressible fluid. Not only will a gas conform to the shape of its container but it will also expand to fill the container.
Plasma: free charged particles, usually in equal numbers, such as ions and electrons. Unlike gases, plasmas may self-generate magnetic fields and electric currents, and respond strongly and collectively to electromagnetic for ces.
Colloids: "in betweens", containing two or more forms of matter. Examples are shaving foam and butter.
Modern States[edit]
Degenerate matter: matter under very high pressure, supported by the Pauli exclusion principle.
Electron-degenerate matter: found inside white dwarf stars. Electrons remain bound to atoms but are able to transfer to adjacent atoms.
Neutron-degenerate matter: found in neutron stars. Vast gravitational pressure compresses atoms so strongly that the electrons are forced to combine with protons via inverse beta-decay, resulting in a superdense conglomeration of neutrons. (Normally free neutrons outside an atomic nucleus will decay with a half life of just under 15 minutes, but in a neutron star, as in the nucleus of an atom, other effects stabilize the neutrons.)
Strange matter: A type of quark matter that may exist inside some neutron stars close to the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit (approximately 2–3 solar masses). May be stable at lower energy states once formed.
Photonic matter: Inside a quantum nonlinear medium, photons can behave as if they had mass, and can interact with each other, forming photonic "molecules".
Quantum Hall state: A state that gives rise to quantized Hall voltage measured in the direction perpendicular to the current flow.
Quantum spin Hall state: a theoretical phase that may pave the way for the development of electronic devices that dissipate less energy and generate less heat. This is a derivation of the quantum Hall state of matter.
Bose–Einstein condensate: a phase in which a large number of bosons all inhabit the same quantum state, in effect becoming one single wave/particle. This is a low energy phase that can only be formed in laboratory conditions and in very cold temperatures. It must be close to zero kelvin (absolute zero). Satyendra Bose and Albert Einstein predicted the existence of such a state in the 1920s, but it was not observed until 1995 by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman.
Fermionic condensate: Similar to the Bose–Einstein condensate but composed of fermions. The Pauli exclusion principle prevents fermions from entering the same quantum state, but a pair of fermions can behave as a boson, and multiple such pairs can then enter the same quantum state without restriction.
Superconductivity: is a phenomenon of exactly zero electrical resistance and expulsion of magnetic fields occurring in certain materials when cooled below a characteristic critical temperature. Superconductivity is the ground state of many elemental metals.
Superfluid: A phase achieved by a few cryogenic liquids at extreme temperature where they become able to flow without friction. A superfluid can flow up the side of an open container and down the outside. Placing a superfluid in a spinning container will result in quantized vortices.
Supersolid: similar to a superfluid, a supersolid is able to move without friction but retains a rigid shape.
Quantum spin liquid: A disordered state in a system of interacting quantum spins which preserves its disorder to very low temperatures, unlike other disordered states.
String-net liquid: Atoms in this state have apparently unstable arrangement, like a liquid, but are still consistent in overall pattern, like a solid.
Supercritical fluid: At sufficiently high temperatures and pressures the distinction between liquid and gas disappears.
Dropleton: An artificial quasiparticle, constituting a collection of electrons and places without them inside a semiconductor. Dropleton is the first known quasiparticle that behaves like a liquid.
Jahn–Teller metal: A solid that exhibits many of the characteristics of an insulator, but acts as a conductor due to a distorted crystalline structure.(experiment was not reproduced and confirmed by other scientists)

Very high energy states
Quark–gluon plasma: A phase in which quarks become free and able to move independently (rather than being perpetually bound into particles, or bound to each other in a quantum lock where exerting force adds energy and eventually solidifies into another quark.) in a sea of gluons (subatomic particles that transmit the strong force that binds quarks together). May be briefly attainable in particle accelerators.
Weakly symmetric matter: for up to 10−12 seconds after the Big Bang the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces were unified.
Strongly symmetric matter: for up to 10−36 seconds after the Big Bang the energy density of the universe was so high that the four forces of nature — strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravitational — are thought to have been unified into one single force. As the universe expanded, the temperature and density dropped and the gravitational force separated, a process called symmetry breaking.