The Higgs particle could have finished up the cosmos by now—here’s why we’re still here

Although our universe may appear stable, having existed for 13.7 billion years, quite a few experiments suggest that it is at risk—walking on the edge of a very perilous cliff. And it’s all down to the instability of a single basic particle: the Higgs boson. In a new research just accepted for publication in Physical Letters B, it is shown that some models of the early cosmos, those which involve substances called light primordial black holes, are improbable to be right because they would have initiated the Higgs boson to end the universe by now.

The Higgs boson is accountable for the mass and interactions of all the particles we are aware of. That’s because particle masses are a result of elementary particles interacting with a field, labelled the Higgs field. As the Higgs boson exists, we know that the field exists. You can think of this field as a faultlessly still water bath that we soak in. It has matching properties across the entire cosmos. This means we observe the same interactions and masses all through the universe. This uniformity has let us to observe and describe the same physics over several millennia (astrophysicists typically look backwards in time).

But the Higgs field isn’t probable to be in the lowest possible energy state it could be in. That means it could hypothetically change its state, dipping to a lower energy state in a certain location. If that happened, however, it would alter the laws of physics radically. Such an alteration would represent what physicists call a phase transition. This is what transpires when water turns into vapor, forming bubbles in the process. A phase transition in the Higgs field would likewise create low-energy bubbles of space with totally different physics in them.

In such a bubble, the mass of electrons would abruptly change, and so would its interactions with other particles. Protons and neutrons—which make up the atomic nucleus and are made of quarks—would abruptly dislocate. In effect, anybody experiencing such an alteration would likely no longer be able to report it.

Constant risk

Recent measurements of particle masses from the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at Cern suggest that such an incident might be possible. But don’t panic; this may only befall in a few thousand billion billion years after we retire. For this very reason, in the corridors of particle physics departments, it is generally said that the cosmos is not unstable but rather “meta-stable,” because the world’s end will not occur anytime soon.

Although there is no real reason to expect that the Higgs field forms numerous bubbles today, a big question in the realm of cosmology is whether the extreme environments just after the Big Bang could have triggered such bubbling. However, when the cosmos was very hot, although energy was existing to help form Higgs bubbles, thermal effects also stabilized the Higgs by altering its quantum properties. Therefore, this heat could not initiate the end of the cosmos, which is perhaps why we are still here.