In nuclear chemistry elements beyond Plutonium do not occur in nature and are synthesized artificially. Is it a similar case for Higgs boson too?
If so, how does it give mass to particles if it doesn’t exist? Did scientists create Higgs at LHC in 2011 just to make sure our universe exists through some kind of circular causation?
I’m obviously not understanding this properly. Please dispel my misunderstandings with reasonable explanations!
Does it exist in nature? Yes and no. The “particles” that particle physicists study are not small chunks of matter the way that we think of matter, like if you could keep slicing a piece of cake smaller and smaller. They’re components of matter made up of quantized fields and forces at the subatomic level. That is, like treating a photon as a discrete thing, although it’s a manifestation of the electromagnetic field.
The smaller particles may have existed independently in the instant right after the Big Bang, when the universe was small and super-highly-energetic. But then it expanded, and the energy spread out, and the small particles “condensed” into matter. That’s why CERN had to build such a giant machine to study them— they have to accelerate subatomic particles up to incredibly high energies to smash them together, so that they fly apart into smaller particles, like the Higgs. They can only exist independently for the tiniest fraction of a second before dissipating that energy and re-condensing back into matter.
So do they exist in nature? Again, yes and no. Not a as “particle” per se, but the fact that things have mass means that you could knock Higgs bosons out of them, however briefly.
(Not a physicist, but I dated one. I hope I absorbed this information correctly.)