Higgs bosons appearing in the ubiquitous Higgs field. The Higgs boson is the quantum of the Higgs field, in much the same way as a photon is the quantum of the electromagnetic field. The Higgs field is one explanation for why some particles have mass and some do not. It explains why, when the symmetry of the electroweak force is broken at low energies, the photons that carry the electromagnetic field do not have mass, while the W and Z bosons that carry the weak force do. The theory states that the W and Z bosons interact with the Higgs field while the photon does not. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is conducting research into this, smashing together high_energy beams of protons to attempt to detect a Higgs boson.