What Gave Mass to Particles After the Big Bang?

[mikhailpavel]

I am rather confused what comprised of the thing that existed before big bang which later turned into matter after the big bang. Moreover, i read somewhere that matter are created spontaneously in the Higg's field. And this Higg's field was created after a fraction of seconds later the big bang. So, does it mean that everything that came from Big bang was nothing but the Higg's Boson (which is still not discovered ). Please explain it. Also, please correct me if i have understood wrong.

 

[bapowell]

Nobody knows what happened before the big bang. We can talk about what happened soon after the big bang, though. And by "big bang", most cosmologists are simply referring to the earliest moments in the expansion history of the universe -- we might not necessarily be talking about the The Event that started it all off.

That being said, the universe emerges from the big bang as a very dense collection of particles. Electrons, quarks, Higgs bosons, etc. At the earliest moments, all the particles are massless! Then, at around 10^-36 seconds, the Higgs boson undergoes a phase change (an event called electroweak symmetry breaking, if you're interested in the technical term). The result of this phase change is that many particles that interact with the Higgs obtain masses.

So, the Higgs boson doesn't create matter. It simply gives mass to the particles of the Standard Model -- particles that started out massless.