Higgs 101

The Higgs boson..the "God Particle" (ick...sorry Leon). The Holy Grail of particle physics. (Um, also there's that dark matter stuff but who knows what it might be...) Where to begin? The Higgs boson is one thing, or many, there, or not, waiting to be discovered, if we can. But what is it? Why is it? Does it exist at all? We know a lot, now, after decades of experiments at the great accelerators. Working backwards: the Tevatron at Fermilab, LEP 1 and 2 at CERN, KEK-B at KEK in Japan, PEP2 at SLAC, CESR at Cornell, the SLC at SLAC, the SppS at CERN, HERA at DESY, Tristan at KEK, PEP at SLAC, PETRA at DESY. But it's all coming down, sooner or later, to the Big One: the LHC at CERN. This machine will, in all likelihood, answer the question: what is the origin of electroweak symmetry breaking? That ...