[RickyS]

Experimental particle physicist here. What you say about Higgs particles "they don't exist under normal condition" is loosely true of all particles in nature in the sense that a particle is nothing but a "quantum" of a "field". Fields pervade all physical space and can vary in time. Particles (or quanta) simply represent a local state of observable things. A field can only do certain things to certain physical states and at a probabilistic level. Notice that fields do things even with the vacuum which is just another state from which particles can be "extracted".

The peculiar experimental challenge about the Higgs field is that it can extract its quanta from certain physical states (certain initial conditions in a particle physics reaction) only at very high energy and with low probability, but that is true also for other particles. Its truly peculiar thing is that the presence of the Higgs field, in addition to the fields of all other particles that we know of, explains why quanta in general have a mass (although this is not clear for neutrinos) through a mechanism where the Higgs field interacts with the quanta of other particles.

[polishdude20]

Can you think of quanta in a field as like knots in a string?

[jasonwatkinspdx]

There's limits to analogies but take a look at a soliton in a wave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=909o_kbCdFg

Solitons are self re-enforcing wave packets in some medium, where the dispersive effects get canceled out. I like to think of field quanta as being similar at a very high handwavy level. Of course the trick with quanta is only certain energy levels are allowed.

[ajkjk]

Not really.

A field's normal vibration is like plucking a guitar string. A quantum is like shaking the end of a rope and seeing a ripple fly down it.

[dist-epoch]

The usual metaphor is springs in a mattress:

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/08/20/qft/

[dguest]

I usually think of the Higgs mechanism (that gives mass) like the surface tension on a pond, whereas the Higgs boson would be ripples. It's not perfect (like any analogy).