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  1. Do particles with mass have a Higgs boson in their make up?

  2. and if so, when the particle is as an electron and is a wave going unobserved through both slits, is it carrying a Higgs in the same state?

Qmechanic
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Peter Kerr
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  • I have had it explained to me that the superposition of a particle does not give it a combined mass for each position but a divided mass I am not an expert by any means , but could you expand on that, is it in a textbook? –  Aug 27 '16 at 23:45
  • This seems to stem from an understanding garnered from an earlier question, but is mixed up with a muddled understanding of the Higgs mechanism and "superposition" seems to be used in a way that implies set of discrete position sets (which is certainly not a proper way to understand the word in general though such a states is compatible with the mathematics of quantum mechanics). – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Aug 28 '16 at 00:20

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Do particles with mass have a Higgs boson in their make up?

Not in the way you seem to imagine it. The Higgs boson is an excitation of the Higgs field, an elementary particle like all other particles in the standard model.. It is the Higgs field that gives mass to elementary particles in the table, including the Higgs boson itself.

and if so, when the particle is as an electron and is a wave going unobserved through both slits, is it carrying a Higgs in the same state?

The wave nature of the electron is a probability density wave, not a mass/energy wave to be carrying anything. As in the first question, the electron is an elementary particle and is not composed out of anything else, that is what "elementary" means.

Composite particles, like the proton, can be mathematically modeled with exchange diagrams and in principle all elementary particles in the table can be in some loops in the Feynman diagrams describing a proton. As the Higgs boson is only interacting with the electroweak sector, its contribution to the soup is infinitesimal due to the small value of the weak and electromagnetic coupling constants and its large mass, and is never considered in the description of a proton.

anna v
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