Timeline for Why do people say that the Higgs mechanism gives mass to the gauge bosons without mentioning the fermions?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
12 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 5, 2016 at 1:22 | vote | accept | tparker | ||
| May 5, 2016 at 0:34 | answer | added | Luke Pritchett | timeline score: 10 | |
| May 4, 2016 at 14:34 | comment | added | Luke Pritchett | @tparker Well that's my ego boost for the day! | |
| May 4, 2016 at 2:52 | comment | added | tparker | @LukePritchett I just talked to Mark Srednicki (of the QFT textbook), and he said the exact same thing | |
| May 4, 2016 at 1:01 | comment | added | Luke Pritchett | @tparker Here's my best guess: If you want a theory with massive spin-one particles you need the Higgs mechanism.* If you want a theory with massive spin-half particles you don't need the Higgs mechanism. In the SM you already know that your fermions have gauge quantum numbers, so you do need SSB for the mass, but you don't in general models of fermions. (* Not precisely true; there are other tricky ways to get spin-one massive states) | |
| May 4, 2016 at 0:36 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/StackPhysics/status/727658048685281280 | ||
| May 3, 2016 at 21:18 | answer | added | xi45 | timeline score: 4 | |
| May 3, 2016 at 19:34 | comment | added | tparker | @LukePritchett I'm just wondering whether there's any important physically reason why they mention the gauge boson masses in the intro sentence but relegate the fermion masses to a subsection | |
| May 3, 2016 at 19:32 | comment | added | tparker | @ACuriousMind 1. That is my question - is the presentation just a personal idiosyncrasy, or is there a fundamental difference that I'm not getting? 2. I know - by "pre-symmetry breaking" I simply meant expressing the Lagrangian in terms of the field where the symmetry is manifest, even if that field configuration isn't the physical ground state. I mentioned having to go to ~100 GeV temperatures to actually have the symmetry unbroken | |
| May 3, 2016 at 19:22 | comment | added | Luke Pritchett | en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_mechanism#Consequences_for_fermions Like this? Both the wikipedia and scholarpedia articles mention the Yukawa terms/fermion masses. Beyond that, you can have massive spin-half particles without the Higgs mechanism, but you can't have massive spin-one particles without the Higgs mechanism. | |
| May 3, 2016 at 19:22 | comment | added | ACuriousMind♦ | 1. I'm not sure where the physics question is here, it seems to be more about personal idiosynracies in the presentation of the Higgs mechanism. 2. You have to be careful when talking about "pre-symmetry-breaking". In vacuum field theory at zero temperature (i.e. what is usually done when introducing Higgs), the theory is never unbroken, the breaking just becomes neglegible. You need thermal field theory to actually consider a "broken" and "unbroken" phase. | |
| May 3, 2016 at 19:12 | history | asked | tparker | CC BY-SA 3.0 |