The Mystery of Mass & Charge: LHC Experiments

[aditya23456]

Biggest problem which LHC is worried about is knowing how mass is related to particles.does this mean that physical significance or understanding about charge is discovered.? If yes,what charge is.? If No,why scientists are not concerned to know about what fundamental charge is by conducting some experiments similar to LHC..Hope I sound meaningful.Thanks for answering

 

[mfb]

Biggest problem which LHC is worried about is knowing how mass is related to particles.

Well, two LHC experiments try to find the Higgs boson, which is predicted by the Standard Model. While it is known that there has to be something which adds mass to the bosons of the weak force (W+, W-, Z), the Higgs mechanism is just the preferred way. There are other options, too.

this mean that physical significance or understanding about charge is discovered.?

No.

Charges (there are more than just the electromagnetic charge) are fundamental properties of particles. Unlike the mass of three bosons mentioned above, charges can just appear from the theory, you don't need something special to get them.

 

[AdrianTheRock]

There have been some past attempts to model electromagnetism as an additional, curled-up space dimension, and these theories work, up to a point. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaluza%E2%80%93Klein_theory.

 

[aditya23456]

charges can just appear from the theory, you don't need something special to get them.

Is there any link where I can get data about this.I read that the standard model doesn't find any need why mass arises,In similar way,Is significance of charge stated in standard model

 

[mfb]

Well, the Lagrangian of the Standard Model (basically the thing you have to find to describe physics) contains terms which describe the interaction between bosons (force carriers) and fermions ("regular particles"), so you can read off which particles will interact with which. Charge is just a way to say "this particle interacts via this force [in this strength]". I don't know how to explain it in more detail without any actual quantum field theory, so you might look for an introduction in that yourself.

Mass is different - it determines the coupling to gravity (so you could call mass "gravitational charge"), but in addition it is important for inertia of particles.

The charges of the individual particles are not something fundamental in the Standard Model - they are determined in experiments and put into the theory. But it is easy to do this.

 

[naima]

You ask what is charge.
There several charges.
I think one can say that a charge is what is globally conserved during time or scattering for isolated systems. They are conserved at each vertex of Feynman diagrams.
search Noether charge on wikipedia