Last week, physicists working with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle-smasher at CERN, in Europe, reported that they had detected a Higgs boson decaying into a Z boson particle and a photon. This is a very rare decay process that tells us important things about the Higgs boson as well as about our universe.
The Higgs boson is a type of boson, a force-carrying subatomic particle. It carries the force that a particle experiences when it moves through an energy field, called the Higgs field, that is believed to be present throughout the universe. For example, when an electron interacts with the Higgs field, the effects it experiences are said to be due to its interaction with Higgs bosons.
