What Does the Higgs Field Actually Do?

“The Higgs gives particles mass” is one of the most repeated lines in physics, and one of the least explained. What does the field actually do, which particles does it affect, and how much of the world’s mass does it really account for? Our Vevette sticker is named for the field’s vacuum expectation value, the number at the heart of the story. This post builds on our explainer What Holds the Nucleus Together?.

What is the Higgs field?

In modern physics every particle is a wave in a field. CERN puts it this way: “The Higgs field was proposed in 1964 as a new kind of field that fills the entire Universe and gives mass to all elementary particles. The Higgs boson is a wave in that field” (CERN^[1]). The proposal came independently from François Englert and Robert Brout (Englert & Brout 1964^[2]) and from Peter Higgs (Higgs 1964^[3]).

What makes it unusual is that it does not switch off. The Nobel Committee’s popular background explains that other fields become zero at their lowest energy, but “even if space were to be emptied completely, it would still be filled by a ghost-like field that refuses to shut down: the Higgs field” (NobelPrize.org^[4]). That leftover value is called the vacuum expectation value, v. The Particle Data Group review gives

v = (√2 G_F)^(−1/2) ≈ 246 GeV

where G_F is the Fermi coupling constant measured from muon decay (PDG Higgs review 2024^[5]). (GeV, a giga-electronvolt, is the particle physicist’s unit of energy and, via E = mc², of mass.)

What does the Higgs field do, exactly?

1. It gives the W and Z bosons their mass

This was the original problem. The weak force is carried by three massive particles, the W⁺, W⁻ and Z, but the symmetric theory of the forces only worked for massless carriers. The Nobel background describes how “the Standard Model would only work if particles did not have mass”, and how Englert, Brout and Higgs supplied “the ingenious mechanism for particles to acquire mass that managed to rescue the Standard Model” (NobelPrize.org^[4]). In the PDG’s technical summary, the field’s non-zero value breaks the symmetry and three massless Goldstone bosons “are absorbed to give masses to the W and Z gauge bosons” (PDG^[5]). The W’s mass, 80.3692 GeV, and the Z’s, 91.1880 GeV, are listed in the PDG summary tables (PDG 2024^[6]). The W is the particle behind our post Beta Decay Unveiled.

2. It gives quarks and charged leptons their mass

Matter particles get mass by a separate coupling to the field, called a Yukawa coupling. The PDG review states that each fermion acquires a mass

m_f = y_f v / √2

where m_f is the fermion’s mass (GeV), y_f is its dimensionless Yukawa coupling, and v ≈ 246 GeV (PDG^[5]). CERN’s plain-language version: “The stronger a particle interacts with the Higgs field, the heavier the particle ends up being. Photons, for example, do not interact with this field and therefore have no mass” (CERN^[1]).

A worked number: top quark versus electron

Rearranging, y_f = √2 m_f / v. With the PDG top-quark mass of 172.57 GeV (PDG^[7]) and electron mass of 0.510 998 95 MeV (PDG^[8]):

y_t = √2 × 172.57 GeV / 246 GeV ≈ 0.99

y_e = √2 × 0.000 511 GeV / 246 GeV ≈ 2.9 × 10⁻⁶

The top quark couples to the Higgs field with a strength of almost exactly 1; the electron about 340 000 times more weakly. The Standard Model does not explain why. The PDG notes that the fermion masses “are simply translated into Yukawa couplings”, free parameters put in by hand.

Does the Higgs field give you your mass?

Mostly not, and this is the biggest misconception. You are made mainly of protons and neutrons, and their mass comes mostly from the energy of the quarks and gluons moving inside them, bound by the strong force. A 2018 lattice QCD calculation by Y.-B. Yang and colleagues split the proton’s mass into parts: quark energy about 32%, gluon field energy about 36%, an effect called the trace anomaly about 23%, and only about 9% from the u, d and s quark scalar condensates (Yang et al. 2018^[9]). That last term is the one tied to the quarks’ Higgs-given masses. So the Higgs field sets the masses of the quarks, but most of the proton’s mass is strong-force energy. For how that binding works, see Why Can’t Quarks Be Isolated?.

The Higgs still matters enormously for you: it gives the electron its mass. As the Nobel background puts it, electrons “play a crucial role in the creation and holding together of atoms and molecules. If the Higgs field suddenly disappeared, all matter would collapse as the suddenly massless electrons dispersed at the speed of light” (NobelPrize.org^[4]).

How was the Higgs field confirmed?

You cannot see a field directly, but you can make it ripple. A ripple is a Higgs boson. On 4 July 2012 the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider announced a new particle (CERN^[1]). ATLAS reported a neutral boson with a mass of 126.0 ± 0.4 (stat) ± 0.4 (sys) GeV at 5.9 standard deviations (ATLAS 2012^[10]); CMS reported 125.3 ± 0.4 (stat) ± 0.5 (syst) GeV (CMS 2012^[11]). The PDG’s current average is 125.20 GeV (PDG 2024^[6]).

To confirm the identity, physicists checked its spin, because “the Higgs boson is the only particle to have a spin of zero”, and in March 2013 they concluded that a Higgs boson had indeed been found (CERN^[1]). Englert and Higgs shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for the theory (NobelPrize.org^[12]). Since then, CERN reports, the field’s interaction with tau leptons was found in 2016 and with top and bottom quarks in 2018, each matching the pattern “the heavier a particle the more likely the Higgs boson is to decay into or be produced from it”.

More from the subatomic crew: our Physics Mugs collection.

FAQ

Does the Higgs field give the photon mass?

No. CERN notes that photons do not interact with the field and therefore have no mass.

Does the Higgs field give neutrinos mass?

Neutrinos have tiny masses, and how they get them is still open. The PDG review notes that the Standard Model omits a neutrino mass term, which could be added if right-handed neutrinos exist, and that neutrinos could also get a different type of mass (Majorana masses) through other interactions with the Higgs field.

Is the Higgs boson the same thing as the Higgs field?

No. The field fills space and does the mass-giving; the boson is a ripple in that field. Finding the boson in 2012 was the proof that the field is there.

References

1. CERN, “The Higgs boson”. https://home.cern/science/physics/higgs-boson
2. F. Englert & R. Brout (1964), “Broken Symmetry and the Mass of Gauge Vector Mesons,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 13, 321–323. https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.13.321
3. P. W. Higgs (1964), “Broken Symmetries and the Masses of Gauge Bosons,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 13, 508–509. https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.13.508
4. NobelPrize.org, popular science background, The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 (Englert, Higgs). https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2013/popular-information/
5. M. Carena, C. Grojean, M. Kado & V. Sharma, “Status of Higgs Boson Physics,” in S. Navas et al. (Particle Data Group), Review of Particle Physics, Phys. Rev. D 110, 030001 (2024). https://pdg.lbl.gov/2024/reviews/rpp2024-rev-higgs-boson.pdf
6. S. Navas et al. (Particle Data Group) (2024), Review of Particle Physics, Phys. Rev. D 110, 030001: Gauge and Higgs boson summary table. https://pdg.lbl.gov/2024/tables/rpp2024-sum-gauge-higgs-bosons.pdf
7. S. Navas et al. (Particle Data Group) (2024), Review of Particle Physics: Quark summary table. https://pdg.lbl.gov/2024/tables/rpp2024-sum-quarks.pdf
8. S. Navas et al. (Particle Data Group) (2024), Review of Particle Physics: Lepton summary table. https://pdg.lbl.gov/2024/tables/rpp2024-sum-leptons.pdf
9. Y.-B. Yang, J. Liang, Y.-J. Bi, Y. Chen, T. Draper, K.-F. Liu & Z. Liu (2018), “Proton Mass Decomposition from the QCD Energy Momentum Tensor,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 212001 (DOI 10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.212001). https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.212001
10. ATLAS Collaboration (G. Aad et al.) (2012), “Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC,” Phys. Lett. B 716, 1–29 (arXiv:1207.7214). https://arxiv.org/abs/1207.7214
11. CMS Collaboration (S. Chatrchyan et al.) (2012), “Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC,” Phys. Lett. B 716, 30–61 (arXiv:1207.7235). https://arxiv.org/abs/1207.7235
12. NobelPrize.org, The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 (Englert, Higgs). https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2013/summary/

Written by Pixelated Physics. Every factual claim is linked to the source we checked; points that are still debated are labelled open.