How many Higgs bosons are there?

Daniel and Jorge explain why our Universe might have more than just one Higgs boson, and what they should be called.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Any Daniel, I've been wondering, how do you keep track
of all the Parkles there are? What do you mean, Well,
You've got the Bosons and the Fermions, and the Massons,
and the Drons and the Patreons and the Gluons. It's
too many. I don't know. If you spend enough time
with them, you just kind of get to know them.
I mean like they have personalities. Yeah, they're all unique.
They have different colors or flavors or spins. I guess

(00:30):
my favorite one is the Higgs boson. Why you like
the flavor of the Higgs boson. I think there's only
one Higgs Boson that we have found so far. Don't
don't dumb. Hi am Poor Handmay cartoonists and the creator

(00:57):
of PhD comics. Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a article physicist,
and I'm bored of a universe with just one Higgs Boson.
Are you bored in general or is it really related
to particles? Daniel? I just want more, more and more,
more particles, more discoveries, more everything, more clues as to
the nature of the universe. And we've had this one
Higgs boson for like almost ten years now. We're ready

(01:19):
for another one. Don't you know they say that less
is more. You get to learn to do more what
you have. That's basically the a project of particle physics
is boil all the particles down to one fundamental particle.
But to do that, we got to see all of them.
So we got to see them more and then make
them less. Man, physicists are so greedy. Welcome to our
podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe April that Chin

(01:40):
of our Heart Radio, in which we try to make
more out of the unknowns of the universe. Explain all
of them to you, the things we do and do
not understand, about how stars form, why planets whizz around them,
whether there is alien life out there, how the universe began,
whether you can teleport, is there another U out there?
All crazy ideas that people have, all the questions that

(02:03):
people ask. We try to tackle all of them and
explain them to you. Yeah, because there are a lot
of questions out there in the universe for us to
explore and to try to find answers to things out
there in space and also things right here in the
palm of our hands. There are trillions and trillions of
little particles even just in your fingertips, and there are

(02:23):
many questions we can ask about them. That's right. And
trillions sounds like an exaggeration, but it's actually not. It's
an under exaggeration. There are bajillions zillions of particles all
around you. Every single one of you is just a
seething mass of quantum particles frothing in and out of existence,
bubbling around and creating who you are. And one of

(02:45):
the goals of this podcast, one of the goals of
particle physics, and I dare say one of the goals
of science is to peel that back and understand it
at its most fundamental level. What is really going on
in the universe at the smallest scales. Yeah, because it
makes up everything that we are and everything around us,
everything we eat, everything we touch, everything we right around

(03:06):
in or serve, the entern it on. It's all made
out of particles, and there are still big questions about
what those particles are, or what those particles can be.
That's right. We have a list of particles that we've discovered,
six quarks, six left on, a few bosons, and the Higgs,
of course, but we don't know how many particles there

(03:28):
are We don't know if the particles we found are
basically the whole picture, if it's everything, or if it's
just the tip of the iceberg. If there are lots
more particles waiting around the corner for us to create
and explore. Did you lose some particles, Daniel? Do you
think they're waiting to jump us or something? What are
they waiting for? Why haven't they revealed themselves. I don't know.
Maybe they're shy, you know, or maybe they're just picky.

(03:51):
Their agents are holding out for like brown Eminem's before
they make their appearance. I see, you need more Eminem's
at the Large Hadron Collider. You need a green room.
First of all, you don't have a green room for particles,
that's true, You just have one big open We need
to pamper our particles more, is what you're saying. It's right,
it's a new field particle pampering. Particle pampering at the
large Eminem collider. Yeah, there you go, maisons and molecules.

(04:16):
But yeah, that's the weird thing about nature, I guess
and the universe is that there are sort of a
lot of possible particles out there, a lot of different
quantum fields, but kind of on an everyday basis, we
only interact or are only made up of stuff in
three fields and three kinds of particles. Yeah, that's because
the universe is mostly pretty cold. Like you can imagine,

(04:38):
the universe has lots of different ways it can be.
Energy can slash around between different kinds of fields, or
if you like to think about particles can slash around
between different kinds of particles. But these days, fourteen billion
years into the life of the universe, things are pretty
spread out in cold and say, everything's mostly relaxed down
to the lowest mass, the lightest particles, the electrons, and

(04:58):
the up and down corks that make up the protons
and neutrons inside of us. But as you say, that
doesn't mean there aren't those other possible particles out there,
and to make them, to see them, we need to
recreate some of those early conditions in the universe, put
a lot of energy into one spot and try to
excite the universe into revealing its secrets. Yeah, because there
are all these other possible particles, and we know we

(05:20):
don't see them in our everyday lives, but they are
sort of there, and sometimes they do kind of show
up in our atmosphere, right, and coming from the Sun.
Sometimes these strange particles sometimes do form around us. Yeah,
you're absolutely right. Our colliders are not the only conditions
for making these crazy particles. There are some big accelerators
out there sort of astrophysically speaking, shooting particles at us,

(05:42):
and when they hit our atmosphere, those collisions can also
make really big, rare, heavy particles and create these big
showers which then filter on down to Earth. So, yeah,
these particles are being created sort of all the time
whenever there's an energetic particle smashing into another one. And
so maybe one of the most famed particles I think, so,
besides the maybe, the electron maybe and the corps, is

(06:05):
this famous one that was discovered about eight years ago. Yeah,
I was announced in twelve. It's the last major discovery
of the Standard Model, and a lot of people describe
it as sort of the last piece of the Standard Model.
It certainly wasn't missing piece. We needed the Higgs boson
or something like it to explain what we were seeing
in the Standard Model, and we found it about ten

(06:27):
years ago, in twenty twelve, and that was very exciting.
It's very interesting, but there are still, as you say,
a lot of open questions. Yeah, and it's not only
famous people think it's super important in the universe. Right.
Some people even called it the God particle. I hate
that name, the God particle. You hate God? No, I

(06:47):
hate the publicist that came up with the title of
that book. I think it was a physicist. I think
it was a physicist publicist. If this book is a
little dry, can you make it a little bit more snazzy,
a little more grand maybe? But the Higgs is pretty
important in the sense that it does sort of kind
of hold the universe together in a way, right, to
give things mass, And if things didn't have mass, they

(07:08):
wouldn't feel gravity, and without that, things would just kind
of float around and not do anything. It would be
a very different universe if particles didn't have mass. Absolutely,
And you can't say the same thing about like the Muan, right,
how different with the university? Oh man, the poor Muan.
The Muan's agent is going to be in here mad
any second. Now. It's like, we need a better public

(07:30):
But you're right, we don't actually need the Muan. In fact,
when we discover the Muan, people were a little annoyed,
and somebody said, like, who what are that? We got
a pretty good system over here. We don't need the muan.
One of the deepest questions in physics is why do
we have particles like the muan and the town that
are just copies of the electron? So you're right, some
particles seem to have cousins or copies. Other ones don't yet, right, right,

(07:53):
And so the Higgs is pretty important because it does
give particles mass. It does give particles mass, and so
it's really important. I guess are still big questions about
the Higgs. I mean, we sort of found one, but
we don't know all there is to know about the
Higgs boson. That's right, There are still lots of fascinating mysteries. Yeah,
and so today on the program, we'll be asking the
question how many different Higgs bosons are there? Wait? I mean,

(08:20):
like there are more than one Higgs boson. It's plural
Higgs bosons. I know, the Higgs might not be so
special after all. Wait, but if it has a twin
it is kind of special. Well, who knows. We don't
know how many higgs there are. There might just be
one Higgs boson. There might be five higgs bosons. There
might be twenties seven higgs bosons as usual. We don't

(08:41):
know if we are looking at the entire ice cube
or just the tip of the iceberg. Are you talking
about whether there is more than one copy of it,
or whether there's more than one type of higgs boson,
more than one different kind of Higgs bosons, the way
there are more than one kind of cork, or there
are more than one kind of electron. Right, the miwank
and the tower are not just other electrons. There are

(09:02):
different kind of particles, you mean, like you would need
different names even then, right, like the tall higgs boson,
the blonde higgs boson, the funny higgs boson. Can I
be in the naming committee? Or we could just keep
using names of gods. You could have the Zeus particle
and the hero particle, the demigod particle. There you go, Yes,
you can be on the naming committee. In fact, I'm

(09:22):
pretty sure you are. The naming committee. Oh good, does
it have any actual power? I don't know. Give it
a powerful name. Call it the powerful naming Committee. There
you go, Yeah, the naming committee. There, just the name
of the committee, the committee. There you go, well, this
is a big question, and now I guess, and in
particle physics is how many different kinds of Higgs bosons

(09:43):
there are, which is pretty interesting. And so, as usually
we'll be were wondering how many people out there were
even aware that there could be different kinds of Higgs
bosons out there. So Daniel went out there into the
wilds of the internet to ask how many different Higgs
bosons are there? And so, if you would like to
be asked to questions about particle physics by a particle
physicist without the opportunity to do any research whatsoever. If

(10:04):
that sounds fun to you, then right to me. Two
questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Here's what people
had to say. Honestly, I thought there was one, so one.
I think it's just one. But I don't think I
would be surprised and with them anymore. Since it is
begot particle, we never know what kind of mysteries and

(10:26):
surprises it might be holding. I thought there was only one,
but given that you asked this question, I guess there's more.
This feels a little bit of like a trick question,
because as far as I know, there's only one Higgs Boson.
But since there are the other ones are all coming paris,
like six quarks or six leptons, I'd say, no, I'm

(10:48):
going to stick to one. I guess there's one higgs
Boson and goes it goes forward and backwards in time,
and there's only one Higgs Boson. People thought there were
there was only one and Tron that was responsible for
the whole universe, you know, But it's it's not even electron.
It's a higgs Boson that just builds everything. I thought

(11:10):
there was only one's Higgs Boston. Isn't that the one
that gives mass to particles? But after listening to your
show long enough, there's probably a negative and a positive,
and a left handed and right handed, and one that
only appears on Fridays. But I thought there was only one.
I think there's only one Higgs Boson because there's only
one Peter Higgs. You imagined being it soon in the

(11:33):
Big Party after discovering Higgs Boson, and then Daniel in
the Dark Hood comes by and tells Storry not so fast.
There are actually fifteen more Higgs Bosons to discover. In
the standard model, there's like six quarks and like six leptons,
so assuming it probably be about the same, maybe three
higgs and like three anti higgs or something similar. Alright,

(11:56):
everyone seems surprised that there could be more than one. No,
that's why I was hoping we could do this episode
to blow everyone's minds and open it up a little
bit to the entire world of possibilities about Higgs bosons. Well,
some people seem to sort of relate it to some
of the other versions of other particles. Like someone said,
maybe there are anti Higgs bosons. Yes, very clever. That's

(12:16):
exactly the kind of thinking that we need to be doing.
We see these patterns in the other particles that have pairs, right,
the electron neutrino or a pair the up in the
down or a pair the electron and the anti electron
are another kind of pair. Why doesn't the Higgs have
other particles it pairs with? Or does it? Right? Don't
dune done? That's the suspense music right there. Maybe there

(12:39):
are many different kinds of Higgs boson. Would it be
then Higgs's Higgs's bosons? What would be the correct grammatical plural?
I think it's like attorneys general, So it's higgs boson, Higgs,
Higgs's or Higgs with the apostrophe. I don't know what
in the field we say Higgs is. We don't say
Higgs boson. We say Higgs's or Higgs bosons. Oh, I

(12:59):
see you're in consistent. That's unusual. I'll take that. I'll
take that on the chin. Yeah, I wouldn't think you
anywhere else. Well, let's take us step back here for
maybe people who are not familiar with what even the
Higgs boson is. So step us through what is the
Higgs boson in the first place? Right, So, the Higgs
boson is a particle, and as usual, a particle is

(13:20):
really just evidence of the existence of a quantum field,
like the electron exists. It's a particle, But that particle
really is just like the electron field getting excited in
a little spot. You inject some energy into the electron
field and you get an electron. So we think of
fields is filling space, and so the Higgs boson is
evidence that there exists this Higgs field, this thing where

(13:42):
if you inject energy into it, a little Higgs boson
pops out. I see, right, Like the whole universe is
filled with these fields. Every part of space has all
of the fields. Every particle that can exist, every part
of space has all those fields all on top of
each other. And when a particle exists point in space,
what we really mean is one of those fields or

(14:03):
several of them have some energy in them. And so
we talk about the Higgs boson a lot, but really
the interesting thing is the Higgs field, because it's the
Higgs field that does cool and fascinating stuff like giving
mass to other particles. Right, that's the big headline for
the Higgs field and the Higgs boson. And so how
does it give mass to particles? It gives mass to
those particles by interacting with them. You have all these

(14:26):
different fields sort of stacked on top of each other
in space, but they don't ignore each other. They couple
with each other, They interact with each other. They slash
energy back and forth and interfere with each other in
specific ways. And the Higgs field is different from all
of the other fields and interacts with particles in a
very different way, and it interacts with those particles in
just the right way so that they moved through space

(14:47):
as if they had inertia. Right. So the particles, we
think without the Higgs boson would have no mass, it
would be massless particles. The electron would be massless, just
like the photon. But because it interacts with the Higgs field,
it changes the way it moves through space. And one
way to think about that is, oh, it's moving through
space interacting with the Higgs field. Another totally mathematically equivalent

(15:09):
way to think about it is it's moving through space
and it has some mass, it has some inertia. Isn't
more accurate than to say that the Higgs field gives
particles inertia, not necessarily mass, yes, because when we talk
about mass, it's like, what do you really mean by mass?
Do I mean the thing that creates gravity? Or do
we mean the property of objects to resist a change

(15:29):
in their velocity? Right, something in motion stays in motion,
something at rest stays at rest. That's really inertia we're
talking about. So sometimes we call that inertial mass. And
so the Higgs field is responsible for inertial mass, like
it's not responsible for giving things gravity exactly, it's not
responsible for giving things gravity. You can have inertial mass

(15:49):
of a particle if it's out there in the middle
of space, not interacting with anything else with no gravity
at all, and so the Higgs has really nothing to
do with gravity, right, So the reason I can't get
up in the more ing is because of the Higgs field, right,
The reason I can't run faster is because of the
Higgs field, But the reason I can't jump higher is
something totally different. That's right. You can always find somebody

(16:10):
to blame, I'm sure. But also the Higgs field is
the reason you're around, so it gets some credit as well,
all right, So then that's how it's important. It gives
things inertial mass, and I guess without inertial mass, things
would be just kind of crazy, right, things, It would
just be flying around at the speed of light all
the time. Yeah, things would definitely be very different. It's
possible to have a universe without inertial mass, like the

(16:31):
Higgs field gives things mass because it's sort of stuck
at this weird value for a reason we don't understand,
and if that value collapsed down to zero, particles wouldn't
have mass anymore. And we talked about this in a
whole episode about could the Higgs field destroy the universe,
And it's not like it would destroy the universe but
it would make for a very very different universe. If
the electron had no mass and up in the down

(16:53):
corps had no mass, the laws of physics and chemistry
and biology would just be totally different. So the reason
the universe is the way it is is because the
Higgs field exists and has a certain amount of energy
sort of built into it, giving mass to all these particles, right,
giving all the particles inertia, and so without inertia, thinks,
which is zip around at top speed basically right, Yeah,
electrons would move at the speed of light exactly, Yeah,

(17:15):
and courts to everything, right, everything, all of it, all right,
And so it also links to the big forces, the
Higgs field, that's right. The reason that we think the
Higgs exists came out of the attempt to combine electromagnetism,
which is the force you're responsible for light and for
magnetism and for lightning and all that kind of stuff,
with this other weird little force, the weak nuclear force

(17:37):
that usually you think about in terms of like radioactive
decay and this kind of stuff, but it's actually very
closely connected to electromagnetism. People realize that if you stuck
these two things together, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force.
You made a single, larger concept, which they called electroweak,
which had some really nice mathematical properties. So that suggested

(17:58):
that electromagnetism and the Week four are not totally separate ideas.
They're really just sort of two sides of the same coin,
and it made more sense to think about them together.
But when people tried to do that, they ran into
a problem. They're like, hold on a second, there's some
big differences between electromagnetism and the weak force. For example,
the photon doesn't have any mass, but the particles that

(18:18):
convey the weak force, the ws and the Z, are
really heavy. So how could you possibly have these two
forces be linked together? And the Higgs is the answer
to that puzzle. The Higgs came out of that puzzle.
People hypothesized, maybe we need a particle like the Higgs
to answer that puzzle. Yeah, that's how you sort of
thought or knew that it was going to be there,

(18:40):
and then in twelve they actually found it. You build
this giant collider and then you hit particles together and
out came the Higgs. Yeah, it's a really cool sort
of triumph of theoretical physics. They were just looking at
these patterns of the particles and noticing, wow, you could
fit these particles together into a larger pattern, but then
you need this one other piece for it to really

(19:00):
click together and make sense. And then we went out
and looked for it, and took about fifty years before
we were able to create the conditions necessary to have
a Higgs boson that we could see and study and understand.
But yeah, then we found it's real. It's actually part
of the universe. Yeah, you can see it like as
a blip on grab and stuff like, it's there. It's
part of reality for sure. It's part of reality for sure.

(19:21):
And so you found one, and so the big question
is could there be more? Could there be more than
one kind of Higgs boson? So let's get into why
we think we need more Higgs bosons and how will
we ever find them? But first let's take a quick break. Alright,

(19:49):
we're talking about the Higgs boson is the most plural
of the Higgs bosons. Then you're saying there could be
more than one, and why do we think there could
be more than one? We think there might be more
than one Higgs boson? Because we get a clue when
we look at the weak nuclear force. So the Higgs
boson is the thing that connects the weak nuclear force
with electromagnetism, right, which means it's sort of part of

(20:12):
the week nuclear force. It talks to the weak nuclear force,
and the weak force has these really interesting structures like
we were talking about before, It tends to pair particles
together into these things we call doublets. For example, the
up cork and the down cork are connected together by
the weak nuclear force. Like when a W boson decays,

(20:32):
it decays into that pair and up and down, or
decays to an electron and a neutrino, sort of the
same way you think about like a particle and an
anti particle being paired, because a photon can decay to
a particle and an antiparticle in the same way a
W can decay into like an up and a down.
So this is one doublet. For example. We call these

(20:52):
particles with the pair them together, we call them a DOUBLET.
But we have lots of these doublets in the weak force,
and so very simply we just ask, like, maybe we
have more than one Higgs doublet. Maybe there are more copies.
Just like, there are copies of the electron, and there
are copies of the corks. I see just from being
associated with the weak force. You think that, hey, maybe
the Higgs also has a twin out there, because most

(21:14):
things that feel the weak force or interact with the
weak force have a twin. Yeah, and they have more
than one twin, right, The electron has two twins. There's
the muan and there's the tow. The upper cork has
two twins also, the charm and the top. And it's
intriguing that both of those have exactly two twins, right,
And so then we wonder, like, why is Higgs different?

(21:36):
Maybe it's the same. One of the games of particle
physics is looking for patterns, for symmetries, for connections, and
drawing inspiration from one part and applying it to another
and asking like, why is this different? Maybe it's not.
I guess not all particles have these twins. Some particles
don't have twins. But you're saying the ones that feel
the weak force or interact with the weak fource do, well,
all the particles interact with the weak force. There's no

(21:58):
particle out there that doesn't interact with the weak force
except maybe the gluon. I guess what about I guess like,
the photon doesn't doesn't the photon does interact with the
weak force. Yeah, if, for example, can decay into a
pair of W bosons, right, the photon can turn into
a W plus and a W minus. So the weak
force is super duper weak, but it's fastening because it
basically touches everything. But the photons don't have a twin,

(22:21):
but we think maybe the Higgs might have a twin. Yeah,
you're right. Photons don't have a twin as far as
we know, and we don't know if there are other
kinds of particles out there, and so the Higgs might
have a twin. And we have some hints from theoretical
physics that suggests that some other problems might be solved
if there were more Higgs bosons. Interesting, so you're saying
the god particle might have a god twin. Yeah, there

(22:44):
might be more gods, right, Particle physics might be polytheistic
after all. All right, Well, maybe step us through. What
are some of the main reasons why we think that
the Higgs boson could have these twins? All right, so
my first and favorite reason is, just like why not.
You know, I guess we said this already, but I
just want to underscore it, like we just don't really
know what's out there, and particle physics is about exploration, right,

(23:08):
We are going out there, we are looking for surprises.
You never know when you turn on a collider what's
going to pop out, and so we've got to keep
an open mind. And when you find one of something,
there might always be other copies. And so it seems
to me like a great idea to sort of symmetrize
the Standard model and add these other copies of the
Higgs boson in the same way. But we also have

(23:29):
extensions of the Standard Model, other problems in the Standard
Model that we're trying to solve by thinking about what
other new particles might be out there. One of them is,
for example, supersymmetry. This is the one that looks at
the fermions in the Standard model, the matter particles and
the bosons, the force particles, and wonders like, why do
we have two different kinds of particles? We have these

(23:51):
matter particles and these forest particles. Why two different kinds
And it suggests like, well, maybe there's some symmetry there.
Maybe for every force particle, there's some matter particle we
haven't found yet that's like a partner of it. And
for every matter particle, there's some force particle we haven't
found yet that's sort of the partner of it. So

(24:12):
it says like, maybe there's this whole copy of the
Standard Model all these other particles out there that are
too heavy for us to have seen yet but might
still exist. So this is a very popular idea in
particle physics. It's called supersymmetry, and this is an extension
of the Standard Model that would solve a bunch of
theoretical problems. And if you have supersymmetry, then you definitely

(24:32):
need to have more Higgs bosons. I see, like, maybe
there's a supersymmetric version of the Higgs out there, Yes, exactly,
why not? Why not? And the super fun thing is
that the supersymmetric versions of these particles take the original
name and add a little modification. So, for example, if
you take a boson and you make a supersymmetric fermion,
you add eno to the end. So a Higgs boson

(24:54):
in the Standard model has a Higgs n no in supersymmetry.
And so we're talking about eggist and higgsinos all the time.
That's the most exciting part for you, starring that there's
something called a higgsino. Yeah, these are fun words to say.
You know, you've got to find pleasure in the daily
craft sometimes, and so zeno and we know, and higgsino
and photino. These are fun words to say. They also

(25:15):
sound like cheb or D flavors. Why not? I think
you should make that the title of your next physics proposal, Daniel,
why not give me ten million dollars? Why? Why not?
Whether I might as well ask for ten billion? You know?
Because why why not? Yeah? Why not? Should be the
title of our next book? Why not? And the key
thing in supersymmetry is that we are creating other particles,

(25:37):
but also other kinds of particles. This is like another
way to reflect our particles. We see this all over
the place in particle physics, that particles have these reflections,
Like the electron has this reflection in its anti particle.
It has reflection in the muan and in the tao
has reflection in the electron neutrino, and so this is
like another direction in which you can reflect the electron.

(25:59):
The tron has this reflection now in the supersymmetric version
of it, the selectron, but because the selectron is different
from the electron, it needs a different kind of Higgs boson. Yeah,
there's all these different ways to like find symmetries in
physics and particle physics to reflect particles, and so you're
saying one of them is the supersymmetry. There are others
ways though, right, Yeah, there's lots of ways to look

(26:21):
for these symmetries, especially when we see things that we
don't understand. And sometimes we see something some behavior between
the particles and it looks like they're obeying a rule,
but we don't know what that rule is or why
that rule exists. For example, something we see sometimes in
particle physics is violation of some symmetries, like the weak
force violates this symmetry we call parity, which says basically,

(26:44):
if you invert the whole universe into a mirror, do
the laws of physics change? And the weak force violates that,
which is really strange. But this kind of violation doesn't
appear in other parts of the standard model, specifically when
you're talking about corks. You don't get these kinds of violations.
And so we don't understand why, Like, why do you
see sometimes these violations in the leptons but not in

(27:06):
the corks where these things seem really similar and the
rules seem really similar. Why is it broken here and
not there? And so people invented other particles like the
axion to try to protect these symmetries, to say, well,
this maybe explains why it happens over here in the
leftons but not in the corks. And if you want
more details about the axon, we have a whole podcast
episode about this crazy particle named after a detergent. Well

(27:29):
least it's a clean name, you know. So how how
would the Higgs explain the axon? Like, how would new
kinds of Higgs bosons you know, resolve this axon problem? Well,
actually you need a Higgs boson in order to let
the axon resolve this problem. Like, the axon is something
which exists in the early universe as the sort of
the universe is relaxing. Remember we think about the universe

(27:52):
is like starting out really hot and high energy and
then sort of cooling down to the universe that we
have today. Well, we think that when universe was really
hot and dense, that it wasn't just like um higher temperature.
We think that basically there were different laws of physics,
not because somebody has changed the simulation, but just because
in different conditions you get different effective laws. Like the

(28:15):
way fluid flows is different if the water is cold
or if the water is frozen, right, the fluid doesn't flow,
So you need sort of like the different sets of
laws for different conditions. And so we think that like
the original set of laws sort of like cracked and
broke into our set of laws in a very specific way,
and the Axion protects it and make sure that it
happens in this way to protect the corks so they

(28:37):
don't violate this symmetry. But for the Axion to do that,
there has to be a second special Higgs boson that
only the Axion can talk to. Interesting like Higgs, but
only for the axion. Yeah, exactly, like an action Higgs.
That's right, a fitter version of the Higgs that doesn't
sit around all day eating chips and watching TV. The
movie Start Twin. You know, there's always to the to twins,

(29:00):
the Hollywood Higgs. Yeah, that's right, the Arnold trash Neger Twin.
Not that Danny de Vito twin. But that's not maybe
even the most interesting or compelling reason why we might
need more higgs bosons. There's more. There's more, of course,
why not. In the end, all these Higgs bosons are
trying to solve like problems we see in particle physics,
and one of the deepest ones is this question of

(29:22):
why is everything we see out there made of matter
and not anti matter? Right? I made of matter, You're
made of matter. We both matter. But when we look
at particle physics, there seems to be this symmetry. There's
no like preference for matter or anti matter. There are electrons,
but there are also a positrons. Every particle has an antiparticle.
So why is the universe seemed to be made out

(29:43):
of matter instead of antimatter. We're looking through the laws
of physics force on preference, but we really haven't found any,
and so people think, like back in the very beginning,
when the Big Bang happened, there was equivalent amounts of
matter and anti matter made. But if that was the case,
then you know, the whole universe should have basically is
annihilated itself into a lot of photons. Clearly that didn't

(30:03):
happen because you and I are here. So we're looking
for like a preference to create matter over antimatter, and
we haven't found one yet. So this is totally unexplained.
But if you add a bunch more Higgs bosons to
your theory, then you create all these ways for matter
to be preferred over antimatter. You create all these processes

(30:24):
that prefer to create matter rather than antimatter. And so
it just sort of gives us a bunch more like
knobs to tweak on our theory to allow us to
potentially explain this matter antimatter asymmetry. I see, it's sort
of like there's stuff you can't explain, so you just
make stuff up. Generally, what I'm hearing from you here
is that what physicists do. That's exactly the job description,

(30:45):
and last time it worked, right. That's basically how we
found the Higgs boson. We couldn't explain why the WS
and disease were heavy and the photon was not, so
we came up with the Higgs boson to explain it,
and it turned out to be real. Now, you know,
that's one example out of the many thousands of ideas
we've had which turned out to not be real. But
that's sort the job. I mean, you're talking to a

(31:05):
cartoons it's my job to make stuff up. So I'm
all for using your imagination here. But yeah, So the
is the idea then that maybe these new undiscovered types
of Higgs bosons might explain this imbalance between matter and antimatter,
Like maybe these mystery higgs bosons somehow let us make
more matter than antimatter. Yeah, these other Higgs bosons would

(31:28):
be free to violate CP symmetry. We talked earlier about
parody symmetry. That's P that says, take the universe and
inverted in a mirror, do you get the same laws
of physics? C means take the universe and change all
the particles to antiparticles. So CP means take the universe
inverted in a mirror, take all the particles, make them antiparticles.

(31:50):
Do the same laws apply? And the reason we're talking
about that is because if you have a process that
violates CP symmetry, then you can create more matter than
time matter. And a bunch of these new, extra complicated,
fancy Hollywood higgs bosons are capable of doing just that,
and so they can explain why in the early universe
when matter and antimatter were created equally, some of that

(32:13):
annihilation turned back into just matter instead of anti matter.
And we are here today. So if that's true, then
we extra the Higgs boson for our existence. You might
even want to call the God particles because it's so
so important, the God's particles, or would this be the
anti God particles? Yeah? Thankically, would you have to call

(32:34):
this one the anti Higgs boson? Yeah, some of these
particles have charges, right, you have charged Higgs boson, So
you can have H plus, you can have H minus,
and they could be anti particles of each other, and
you could have Higgs Higgs annihilation, all sorts of crazy stuff.
It's gonna make great TV action anti Higgs boson. The

(32:55):
scripts just write themselves. All right, Well, that's pretty cool,
and so let's get into how we might ever find
these new types of Higgs in it, or if we
will ever and why did it all means? But first,
let's take another quick break. Alright, we're talking about different

(33:22):
kinds of Higgs bosons. There might be not just one
Higgs boson, but maybe multiple kinds of Higgs bosons, ones
that explain the different symmetries we see in other particles,
or maybe even explain why we're here and not anti
versions of us. So, Daniel, I guess the big question
is are people looking for these new higgs and how
are they looking for them? And do you think we'll

(33:43):
ever find them? Yeah, we are definitely looking for them.
As soon as we started looking for the Higgs boson,
we were actually simultaneously looking for other Higgs bosons as well.
You know, we didn't know at the time was there
one Higgs boson, Was there even any Higgs boson in
our universe, and so we were open to lots of
different ideas and a bunch of theories predicted that we

(34:03):
wouldn't just find one Higgs boson it once, that we
would find a bunch all at the same time. But
we only found the one so far. That doesn't mean
that there aren't more, and so we are looking for
them at the large hGe On collider all the time,
very actively, Yeah, meaning like you're looking at the collisions
and you're looking for strange things that pop out or
that don't match what you think you will see. Yeah,

(34:23):
what we do is we smash the protons together and
hope that new interesting particles are created. Right, we can't
control what happens when two protons smashed together. Quantum mechanics
decides from the list of possibilities what gets made. And
if we have enough energy so that like a heavy
Higgs boson, a crazy new Higgs boson is on the menu,

(34:44):
then sometimes it will be made, and then we can
look for its distinctive pattern because we think we know
what that would look like. We think, for example, that
there might be a Higgs boson that has positive to
electric charge Higgs plus plus, and that would decay to
another particle and the other particles and it would leave
sort of a distinctive spray in our detectors. So that's

(35:05):
the kind of thing that we are looking for. Wait,
what like the Higgs would have double positive charge. Yeah,
there would be many of these higgs is. The thing is,
once you start adding higgses, you very quickly get a
lot more Higgs because you might not be aware. But
in the standard model, our current theory, we actually secretly
have four higgs is, not just one. Wait what the

(35:26):
theory already predicts four higgses. The theory predicts four higgs is,
but three of them got eaten. So the W plus,
the W minus, and the Z boson eight three of
the Higgs bosons. That's how they got their math. What
do you mean they got eaten? What does that even mean?
It means that in a universe without a Higgs field,
you would have not have the W plus, the W minus,

(35:49):
and the z boson. You have other particles that were
like pure electroweak particles, but the Higgs field is there,
creates four particles, and three of those combined with the
W plus, the W minus the z to make these
like weird mixtures of particles. So the W plus is
not just actually a week boson, it's a week boson
mixed in with a bunch of Higgs boson, and that's

(36:10):
why it has mass. Whoa wait, what does it mean
for quantum fields to make like they act together they
merge into one? What does that even mean? It means
that they act together. You know that you can have,
for example, superpositions of different states, right, You can have
like an electron is partially spin up and partially spin down. Well,
a W plus boson is partially pure electro weak field

(36:33):
and partially one of these Higgs boson fields. In the
standard model. You have. One of these is called the
Higgs doublet that actually gives you four Higgs bosons. Three
of them get eaten by the W plus, the W minus,
and the Z and one of them is left over.
That's the one that we found. So what happens if
you add a second Higgs doublet, Well, you get four
more Higgs bosons. So you can't just go up from

(36:55):
like one higgs boson to two. You go from four
to eight, five of which would now be visible because
three of them have been eaten. Well, once you go, hey,
you gotta go full higgs. Like you get a order
the whole family. The whole family comes to visit at
Saint It's family style everything at the Higgs boson restaurant.
And so some of these new higgs is would be
positively charged, negatively charged. Some of them might have plus

(37:18):
two charges, right, Higgs plus plus. And that's not something
we've ever seen before, the particle with positive to electric charge.
So then what are you saying that we have found
other higgs. But they're just kind of I don't know,
they're part of the other the W boson, do you
know what I mean? Like we have them, they're just
kind of like, you know, part of these other particles. Yeah, exactly,
that's a nice way to say it. We found this

(37:40):
one independent Higgs boson, and it's three sort of siblings
got eaten by the other one, so we know that
they are there. If they weren't there, then the W
and the Z would also have zero mass and the
weak force wouldn't be very weak. Well, maybe eating is
just maybe not the right way to say. It's just
like it got merged, or it is part of these
other particles that's to eat, is how the theoretical physicists

(38:02):
call it. They say that these degrees of freedom got
eaten by the ws and disease, and so that's the
way they like to talk about it. Locked in maybe
you know what I mean, Like it didn't get digested.
It's just there's but it's just not free. It's not independent. Yeah,
it's not free. It's not independent, which means it's not
its own field that you can create in a collider
and study. So those are you might never see, but

(38:24):
you could maybe see other kinds of independent higgs. Yea,
if you make another doublet, there's no more ws and
zas to eat parts of them or to absorb parts
of them, or whatever your word you want to use,
and so all the four particles from that doublet would
then be free to make new Higgs fields, and so
those might be out there. There might be two Higgs doublets,
meaning that there would be a total of five free

(38:46):
Higgs bosons running around the universe, or there might be
three Higgs doublets, which would give you nine Higgs bosons
free to run around the universe. And we could make
these at the particle collider if we had enough energy
to read them and study them. That's always the key
with particle colliders. So maybe the question is not like
does the Higgs boson have other versions? It does, but

(39:08):
it's like how many free versions does it have that
we might be able to see on their own exactly?
So far we've only seen the one free Higgs, but
there could be other ones running around. Well, you might
have to pay for those, right, Higgs max you can upgrade.
You gotta pay for the it's a subscription model to
get the better premium version. I want the ad free Higgs. Please. Yeah,

(39:32):
all these physics is talking in your ear. I would
pay for that for sure. I'll see what I can do.
So it is an active thing that you guys are
looking for in the particle colliders. You are like sitting
through the data looking for the evidence of these other
free Higgs bosons. We are all the time. There are
people devoting their pH dpcs two looking for these things.

(39:52):
And you know, one of the most popular theories is
called a two Higgs doublet model, which would be adding
another Higgs doublet to the theory, creating for more free
Higgs bosons, and people are looking for that all the time.
They're writing papers about it. People are also looking for
new Higgs bosons within supersymmetry. Supersymmetry a very very active
area of research. Maybe like half of the people at

(40:12):
the Large Adon Collider are looking for supersymmetric particles because
it's such an exciting theory. So far, nobody has seen anything,
Like there's no hint of basically any new particles past
the Higgs boson we already saw. I see. So you've
been searching for man almost ten years or more, but
so far no hints at all, like no small clues,

(40:33):
no those small blips, no small you know, encouraging results,
no small hints from ATLAS or from CMS. These two
experiments that collide protons and look at what comes out.
But we do have some very intriguing hints from other
experiments that suggests that there might be these weird new
heavy particles out there which could be additional Higgs bosons.

(40:54):
And you probably heard about the Muan G minus too
experiment for example. Yeah, we just talked about it on
a previous episode, And this is exactly the kind of
thing that the Muan g menas To experiment is great
at the saying are there other particles out there? Are
there well more specifically other fields out there in the universe,
So when a Muan is flying through and some of
the energy from the Muan slashes into those other fields,

(41:17):
does it create momentarily these other heavy particles which could
be dark matter, but they could also be a new
heavy Higgs boson if that heavy Higgs boson field is
out there for the Muan energy to slash into. Now,
they can't tell when they do that experiment what it
is the Muan is slashing its energy into. But they
do see a discrepancy as we talked about, when they

(41:39):
look at how the Muan's magnetic field wobbles. It doesn't
wobble the way they expect. And one explanation for that
is that there are other heavy particles out there, too
heavy for the large Hagon collider to make directly, but
that are influencing the way the energy from the Muan
sort of slides through the universe. So you're looking for hints,
a little little you know, of relations that made there's

(42:01):
more to two particles out there, and including these maybe
anti higgs, yeah, including these anti higgs. And this is
the pattern in particle physics. Before we find a particle
like directly explicitly at a collider, we usually have hints
from other experiments that suggest there's a new heavy particle
out there. For example, before we saw the top cork,
we were pretty sure it's there because we saw a

(42:23):
results from other experiments that didn't have the energy to
make the top cork but could be influenced by the
top cork in loops in exactly the same way. And
so now we have that with the Muan, g mightus
to experiment is suggested that maybe there's a new particles
around the corner, and it's not the only one. Is
this other experiment involving Penguin diagrams that we talked about

(42:44):
on the podcast recently that comes from a different experiment
at certain that in the same way suggest there might
be new heavy particles at play in how some weird
b particles decay. And again, we don't know what that means.
It could do this. It could be that it could
be just a mistake. But if it's real, it's suggests
that there are extra particles out there, and they could
be Higgs is all right, So if you find that,

(43:06):
that would be a pretty big deal. But what happens
if you don't find them? What could it mean? Yeah,
if we don't find them, it means we're marking up
the wrong tree. And it doesn't mean that the standard
model is wrong. It just means that we don't have
an answer to the big questions like why is there
more matter than antimatter? Why are there three copies of
the electron? Why are the corks and the left on
so similar when our theory says that they're kind of independent.

(43:28):
We just don't have the answer to those questions, and
so it might just mean that we need to think
more deeply. We need to like stare at the puzzle
the way you know sometimes you look at those magic
eye paintings and all of a sudden boom, something pops
out at you when you're looking at a picture of
a parrot. It might just be that we need to
stare at the periodic table, the fundamental particles and see
a new idea, see a new pattern, ask a new

(43:49):
kind of question, and something else to look for. You're
right in your proposals as well. Give me ten billion
dollars to stare at my computer screen, and why not?
That's basically theoretical physic X right there. Yes, But I'm
an experimentalist. I say give me ten billion dollars. I'm
gonna go try to make these particles and prove they exist,
or I'm gonna ignore the theorist. I'm gonna go try
to make some new particle we didn't expect, find something

(44:12):
totally surprising that isn't anticipated, and it gives us a
clue as to how the universe works. And don't forget
the coffee. You guys need a coffee. That's important part
of physics to r that's like ten percent of the
budget right there. Ye, well that's a minute dollars and coffee.
Have you steen prices at Starbucks recently? Oh my gosh?
All right, Well, I guess let's see if we find
more Higgs bosons, because that would make a lot of

(44:33):
sense in this universe with all these strange particles and
strange phenomenon, and it would sort of complete our picture
of the universe. It certainly would. It would answer a
lot of questions. It would give us clues as to
how things are working at the deepest level, and maybe
it would finally help us figure out what the next
layer of reality is deeper below these corks and leptons.
What's really going on? Are they tiny strings? Are the

(44:56):
little quantized units of space? Is it something else? Totally
be different we never imagined And what's the correct way
to write it's plural version? And who's going to be
on that community? I'm already too many mini is Danniel?
All right? We hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us,
See you next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that

(45:23):
Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of
I Heart Radio. For more podcast for my Heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. Yea