Sunday, 10 April 2016

Are there Higgs bosons in the Sun?


To find the Higgs boson, we had to build the biggest machine mankind has ever built: the LHC with a collision energy of up to 14 TeV. Inside the sun there is a huge pressure and temperature, but is the energy density high enough for Higgs bosons to be created?



Answer



You probably know that the mass of the Higgs boson is around $125$ GeV, which means the energy it takes to create a Higgs boson is around $125$ GeV and therefore that the temperature at which significant numbers of Higgs bosons will be created will be given by $kT = 125$ GeV. One GeV is $1.602 \times 10^{-10}$J, so the corresponding temperature is around $10^{13}$K - note that this is an order of magnitude estimate.


Anyhow, the temperature at the centre of the Sun is around $10^7$ K, so it's six orders of magnitude too low to create significant numbers of Higgs bosons.


Even a supernova only gets to a temperature of about $10^{11}$K, which is still two orders of magnitude too low.


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