VevetteHiggs Field / Vacuum Expectation ValueSticker

Vevette is a sommelier who lives in the punt of a wine bottle, and she has never once stood in the middle.

The Higgs field’s potential, the first line on this page, has that shape: a hump at zero and a circular valley around it. Zero is a balance point, not a resting place. So everywhere in the universe the field settles in the valley, at a value that is not zero: v over root two, where v is about 246 GeV, fixed by the strength of the weak force through the Fermi constant, the second and third lines.

In 1964 François Englert and Robert Brout, and separately Peter Higgs, showed how a field like this lets the W and Z bosons, which carry the weak force, have mass without breaking the theory. Higgs pointed out that it also predicts a new particle, a ripple in the field itself. In July 2012 the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider announced it, at about 125 GeV. Englert and Higgs shared the 2013 Nobel Prize.

Every particle that comes to Vevette’s tasting gets a pour that grows with its Yukawa coupling to the field, the last line. The top quark’s glass is full, its coupling close to one. The others get a drop, and the electron’s drop needs a loupe. The glasses are not to scale.

She is careful not to overclaim. The photon and gluon stay massless. Most of the proton’s mass comes from the energy of the strong force binding its quarks, not from her. Where neutrino masses come from is still unknown. And it isn’t molasses: nothing here is drag.

Nothing at zero. I sit at 246.