Lesson Plan: The Higgs Boson Physics
This lesson plan includes the objectives, prerequisites, and exclusions of the lesson teaching students how to identify the basic properties of the Higgs boson and explain what decay modes the Higgs boson has.
Objectives
Students will be able to
- recall what the symbol for the Higgs boson is,
- recall what the relative charge of the Higgs boson is,
- recall the approximate mass of the Higgs boson,
- recall that the Higgs boson is a boson,
- recall some of the common decay modes of the Higgs boson,
- recall that the Higgs mechanism is thought to give particles mass.
Prerequisites
Students should already be familiar with
- the names, basic properties, and symbols of all of the leptons, quarks, photons, gluons, and bosons, and their antiparticles,
- what hadrons, baryons, mesons, and hyperons are,
- some common baryons and mesons,
- how to draw and interpret Feynman diagrams,
- the idea that particle decay is limited by the mass–energy of the initial particles.
Exclusions
Students will not cover
- how the Higgs mechanism actually works,
- the underlying integrals that Feynman diagrams represent,
- spin.