The Higgs boson may be key to understanding the first moments of the universe. If the early universe was too disordered, everything would have collapsed into black holes moments after the big bang. Luckily, this didn’t happen, and some new calculations suggest the Higgs boson could be the reason why.
Near the start of the beginning of the universe, everything was compressed into a very small space. Then, a process called inflation took over, rapidly expanding space to astronomical proportions.
Most cosmologists agree that inflation happened, but it’s much less clear how. David Sloan at the University of Oxford, UK, and George Ellis at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, have calculated that the Higgs boson may be the missing piece of the puzzle.
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Inflation requires a particular kind of particle that permeates every point in space, and the only such particle we’ve seen is the Higgs boson. According to Sloan and Ellis’s calculations, if the Higgs boson really is responsible it would solve an important sticking point in our understanding of inflation – what the universe was like before it happened.
They reason that the universe probably started in a fairly disorganised or high-entropy state, simply because there are more of them than highly-ordered states. “Suppose you throw a million dice,” Sloan says. “There’s only one way you get all sixes, but once you introduce one number that’s not a six there are five million ways you could do that.”
One of the highest-entropy states is a black hole, but the early universe couldn’t have been filled with black holes because it wouldn’t lead to the situation we have today. This is because black holes often clump together and wouldn’t lead to the smooth universe we see now, with matter equally spread out everywhere.
A single mega black hole wouldn’t be right either. “The problem with it being all one black hole is that then you’d have this one singularity and you wouldn’t be able to expand it into trees and birds and all the wonderful things we see in the universe now,” says Sloan.
What goes up
We still don’t fully understand the Higgs boson, but one idea is that the its associated field is inversely correlated to gravity. In other words, as the strength of the Higgs field increases the strength of gravity decreases.
Sloan and Ellis’s calculations show this would mean the black hole problem could be avoided entirely. As the Higgs field would have been stronger shortly after the big bang, gravity would have been much weaker, keeping matter from being crushed into black holes before inflation began to spread everything out.
This is a big step beyond the standard model, but it’s plausible because of the ways we think gravity and the Higgs field interact now, says David Wands at the University of Portsmouth, UK.
However, one downside of the idea is that we may never be able to test it. “Inflation is so extravagant in the amount of space that it produces that we only get to see a tiny portion of the whole universe as inflated,” says Wands. “It is hard to test these ideas about what happens before inflation in the patch of the universe that we see.”
Sloan believes we shouldn’t write off testing the idea yet though as we may be able to see its effects in the areas of the current cosmos that are most like the super-dense pre-inflation universe, such as right outside of black holes, says Sloan.
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