How much energy is needed to manipulate the Higgs field?

[repollo]

Hi everyone,

So I've been wondering how much energy does it takes to impart some kind of effect on the higgs field. I've been trying to look for the energy the LHC generates and compare it to the actual amount of energy that it takes for the higgs field to be affected, but since this is all new there is not an exact answer and was wondering if anyone has better direction to determine this.

Thanks in advance,
repollo

 

[Simon Bridge]

What do you mean by "energy for the Higgs field to be affected"?

 

[repollo]

The man-made energy one need to make to impart an effect on that kind of field. The energy that makes the LHC is huge and it is not specifically to impart an effect on the higgs field, as in making an higgs boson. The energy that's generated is to smash things with one another, but is not to only to for the higgs field to be affected. And I just noticed I just repeated myself somehow, "valga la redundancia". I guess the more the merrier in explanations.

 

[Simon Bridge]

The man-made energy one need to make to impart an effect on that kind of field.

Yes - what does than mean - what do you mean by "effect"? What effect did you have in mind?

The energy that makes the LHC is huge and it is not specifically to impart an effect on the higgs field, as in making an higgs boson.

You mean not all the energy in the collision went to make a Higgs Boson, some went to do other stuff?
You want to know the energy to make a Higgs Boson and nothing else?

That is the same as the rest-mass energy of the Boson.
Which is something you can look up for yourself. 125-126GeV.

 

[repollo]

Damn, that was kind of obvious, I am just acknowledging my stupidity, sorry.

I mean, I've read it a couple of times but I don't know where my mind was.

 

[Simon Bridge]

No worries. Sometimes it is just because of the words you choose - it often helps to be specific.

 

[repollo]

Yeah, thanks for the clarification.

 

[repollo]

I've been looking for different energy sources for this and have been doing lots of energy conversion, and actually it's making me think at the approach we use to utilize energy in general, and seems really ineffiecient. For example lightning can produce around 1x10^12 eV so is making me wonder if there's even the possibility for higgs bosons to be created by lightning. Theoretically is supposed to, but the question may be how can we actually analyze this, let alone measure a higgs boson in the wild. We are longs way to go if we really want to explore the universe. Do i make any sense?

PS sorry for my gramatically incorrect approach of writing, since as you may have already found, it is not my native language.

 

[Simon Bridge]

There is more to it that just putting enough energy into one spot - it has to be given a reason to be one kind of energy rather than another.

i.e. you can easily make kinetic energy, but unless you point it at least a bit upwards it won't turn into gravitational potential energy no matter how hard you throw.

 

[ChrisVer]

1. The energy of a lighting is not going in one spot- it's spread. Accelerators don't allow the energy to be spread, by keeping particles all together in small "packs" (that's the reason you need very strong magnets).
2. You don't need only enough energy, you also need enough events... For example LHC creates a lot of trash events, which it has to trigger somehow. I mean that the Higgs is not the only thing you produce at 126GeV energies... your accelerating particles are protons, but you expect interactions between gluons+quarks. The last bear only a small fraction of the total energy the proton has (along the trajectory), and that's why it had to run at TeV scale to find the Higgs in pp colider. Also the main interaction between quarks and gluons lead to hadronization (creation of mesons or hadrons from the strike), than Higgs.

 

[repollo]

Thanks for the clarification, but still makes me wonder in what is left "on the end" of a lightning strike. Around 1e12 of energy ;)

 

[ChrisVer]

kinetic energy (thermal)... which is fastly spread in the environment (eg by the sound it makes etc)... that's what is left...
As a quantity, 1e12 eV energy for the macro-world is not a big number...

 

[repollo]

TeV is not a big number?

 

[ChrisVer]

For the macroworld? No it's not... It's around 10^-7 Joules... note the minus...
It's a "big" number when it comes to the microworld, for the elementary particles.

 

[repollo]

1e12 eV = 1x10^12 eV = 1Tera eV = 1,000,000,000,000 eV.

 

[ChrisVer]

Why are you writing the zeroes? ahaha
That something has a lot of zeroes doesn't mean it's necessarily big. It depends on what you measure...
I can write you 1pc and you can write 30,000,000,000,000,000m... we are both giving the same number.
People in the microworld are more experienced in working with Joules rather than eV. eV is a nice choice of energy dimensions only if you are working in the microworld.
The 1eV~1.602* 10^-19 Joules

The proton mass for example is roughly 1GeV, is that a "big" mass?

 

[repollo]

Hmm i see.

 

[ChrisVer]

^editted

 

[mfb]

A lightning strike has an energy way above 1 TeV, but it is spread out. And as mentioned, 1 TeV is a lot for a single particle, but nothing in the macroscopic world.

At the LHC, roughly 1 out of 10 billion collisions produces a Higgs boson. The huge challenge for the detectors is to identify those rare events in all the other stuff.