2 years, 2 months ago
What is the Z zero particle? What role does this messenger particle play in the Higgson boson particle?
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M$1 Answer
The Z0 is the gauge boson mediating the neutral weak current. It is in a manner of speaking the massive "brother" of the photon (which mediates the EM interaction).
Since the Higgs boson is supposed to have an interaction probability with other particles that increases as a function of those particles' mass, the heavy Z0 (about 90 times more massive than a proton) has a relatively high interaction probability. This could e.g. be a Z0 emitting a Higgs boson and continuing on with less kinetic energy, it could be a Higgs "decaying" into a pair of Z0 particles, etc.
Since the Higgs boson is supposed to have an interaction probability with other particles that increases as a function of those particles' mass, the heavy Z0 (about 90 times more massive than a proton) has a relatively high interaction probability. This could e.g. be a Z0 emitting a Higgs boson and continuing on with less kinetic energy, it could be a Higgs "decaying" into a pair of Z0 particles, etc.
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M$
The EM and weak force are two aspects of the Electro-Weak interaction. Once the energy density is low enough, they split into the two separate interactions known to us as EM and weak force.
The weak force has charged and neutral versions. The charged weak current is mediated by the W+ and W-, while the neutral one is mediated bu the Z0.
The hope was indeed that we could measure an "associated production" of Higgs bosons via the Z0 -> Z0+H process in LEP. However, apparently the Higgs is so massive that the cross-section (probability) of that interaction was too low to be visible at LEP. The Large Hadron Collider is designed to have many orders of magnitude more events, so the hope is that the Higgs will be found in one of the LHC experiments (e.g. ATLAS and CMS).
If the Higgs boson is never found then Field Theory theoreticians will need to come up with either a version of the theory that gets away with not being able to measure it in principle, or more likely a different theory that explains how the photon is mass-less while the W+, W-, and Z0 are relatively very massive.
By the way, the top quark was finally discovered years ago at Fermilab's CDF (and D0) at a mass of over 174 GeV/c^2 after decades of prior attempts.
How are the EM and Weakforce related? Will you elaborate on the Z zero mediating the neutral weak current? If Z zero emits a Higgs Boson then a super collider should be able to create enough kinetic energy in the electron and positron to create the Z zero and a Higgs Boson should appear. What happens, if the Higgs Boson does not appear? Predictions on the Top quark emergence have been wrong.