The Higgs boson, a fundamental scalar boson with mass 125 GeV, was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in 2012. So far, experiments at the LHC have focused on testing the Higgs boson’s couplings to other elementary particles, precision measurements of the Higgs boson’s properties and an initial investigation of the Higgs boson’s self-interaction and shape of the Higgs potential. The Higgs boson mass of 125 GeV is a remarkable value, meaning that the underlying state of the Universe, the vacuum, sits very close to the border between stable and metastable, which may hint at deeper physics beyond the standard model. The Higgs potential also influences ideas about the cosmological constant, the dark energy that drives the accelerating expansion of the Universe, the mysterious dark matter that comprises about 80% of the matter component in the Universe and a possible phase transition in the early Universe that might be responsible for baryogenesis. A detailed study of the Higgs boson is at the centre of the European Strategy for Particle Physics update. Here we review the current understanding of the Higgs boson and discuss the insights expected from present and future experiments.

希格斯玻色子是一种质量为 125 GeV 的基本标量玻色子，于 2012 年在欧洲核子研究中心的大型强子对撞机 (LHC) 中被发现。 到目前为止，LHC 的实验主要集中在测试希格斯玻色子与其他基本粒子的耦合、精确测量希格斯玻色子的特性以及对希格斯玻色子的自相互作用和希格斯势能形状的初步调查。125 GeV 的希格斯玻色子质量是一个非凡的值，这意味着宇宙的基本状态真空非常接近稳定和亚稳态之间的边界，这可能暗示着超越标准模型的更深层次的物理学。希格斯势也影响关于宇宙常数的想法，暗能量驱动宇宙加速膨胀，神秘的暗物质，约占宇宙物质成分的 80%，早期宇宙中可能发生的相变可能是重子发生的原因。对希格斯玻色子的详细研究是欧洲粒子物理战略更新的核心。在这里，我们回顾了目前对希格斯玻色子的理解，并讨论了从现在和未来的实验中预期的见解。