Aha... So you are saying we are looking for a standard model based Higgs... Which would then be used to convince that standard model describes the universe as best as possible... A bit circular wouldn't you say?

The standard model predicts the existence of the Higgs. How would finding it and declaring that a success of the model be circular in any way?

What's this crap about it "giving everything mass"?

I understand how the existence of a particle can give another particle mass (through the energy created by spontaneous interactions between virtual particles etc etc.), but I don't understand how one particle could be responsible for all particles' mass.

For anyone interested you can try reading these as much as you can follow;


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standar...formulation%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontan...metry_breaking

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_mechanism

Susskind lecture on the subject (re; "giving mass");

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw4K3sgza04


I may try to arrange some links better later when i get time to get it from very simple to the real things gradually. And of course anyone else can do it too as they see fit.

I'm using the numbers from the actual data... Just because I am not ready to drink the cool aid hardly qualifies as a lack of understanding. Now when you have observed more than 10 of these so called higgins you speak of, we will talk. Until then enough of this bull**** news conferences about a whole lot of nothing.

So if you get mass generation via dynamical symmetry breaking for protons/neutrons in QCD, spontaneous symmetry breaking via the Higgs is very similar. The Higgs has a non zero vacuum expectation, so other particles (and the Higgs boson itself) acquire mass via interaction with this field.

It's a good question. The main aspect of the Higgs that makes it special is has a non-zero vacuum expectation value. This means that you can effectively write the higgs field as:

H = V + h

Where V is the non-zero but constant "vacuum expectation value" and h is perturbations around that value (essentially, the Higgs bosos).

So, if a particle represented by a field Y (looks like psi...) couples to the higgs field like this (schematically):


L_int = gHYY

then it is coupling like this:

L_int = gVYY + ghYY

where g is some coupling constant.

The first term is really a self coupling of the particle with a constant in front, and this is the part of the higgs that gives the particle Y mass. A mass term of Y would simply look like mYY, so the mass of the particle effectively becomes gV.

The second part is the interaction with the Y field and the higgs boson field, which implies that anything that gains mass via the higgs mechanism also much interact with the higgs boson (I guess that's obvious...) It also means that a particle with more mass ( ie larger gV, or simply larger g) couples stronger to the higgs boson (since the coupling constant to the boson, the h, is g). This is why higgs like to be made via top quarks (which are heavy) and why it likes to decay into heavy bosons (if it can).

That's the whole point. Stop posting.

Can there be anything more important to discuss than this? This thread isn't suited for trolling, imo.

Another issue nobody has really touched upon is chirality and how the standard model being chiral is crucial to have light but non zero fermion mass...but it's pretty technical and pretty hard to explain math free.

I'd appreciate it if you tried, even if you have to use a little math...

Actually, here is a pretty good intro

http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2011/0...and-the-higgs/

And a more math based description here

http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/...es/002233.html

Maybe he is talking about the cancellation of the chiral anomaly terms that enforces that leptons and quarks appear in complete multiplets with the structure (EL,eR,QL,uR,dR) (for the case of electron and its neutrino and u and d quarks) (forced by experiment that weak interaction currents are left-handed ie chirality) and the subsequent generation of mass terms for the fermions.

(EL,QL are the left handed leptons quarks fields ie doublets,eR,uR,dR the right handed singlets of SU(2) and only left handed couple to the W bosons).

try this if you do not have the book (page 713)

http://books.google.com/books?id=EVe...page&q&f=false

Yeah, I don't really do much phenomenology so I was sort of skipping ahead to unifying [SU(3)SU(2)U(1) +maybe gravity] in a larger gauge group spontaneously broken at higher energies. It's crucial that you are able to embed massless chiral fermions that acquire mass (and a right handed form) after breaking SU(2)U(1).

As you prob know, when you try to start with non chiral fermions you either end up with no fermions at all up until the GUT/Planck scale or a completely non chiral spectrum at low energies. Alot of unification ideas fail because they try to "spontaneously" get a chiral fermion representation from a non chiral one and that just doesn't work.

New particle found at atlas

http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.5154