Abstract
The Higgs mechanics is very powerful, it furnishes a description of the electroweak theory in the standard Model which has a convincing experimental verification. But although the Higgs mechanism had been applied successfully, the conceptual background is not clear. The Higgs mechanism is often presented as spontaneous breaking of local gauge symmetry. But local gauge symmetry is rooted in redundancy of description, gauge transformation connect states that cannot be physically distinguished. Gauge symmetry is therefore not symmetry of nature, but of our description of nature. The spontaneous breaking of such symmetry cannot be expected to have physical effects since asymmetries are not reflected in the physics. If spontaneous gauge symmetry breaking cannot have physical effects, this causes conceptual problems for the Higgs mechanism, if taken to be described as spontaneous gauge symmetry breaking. In a gauge invariant theory, gauge fixing is necessary to retrieve the physics from the theory. This means that also in a theory with spontaneous gauge symmetry breaking, a gauge should be fixed. But gauge fixing itself breaks the gauge symmetry, and thereby obscures the spontaneous breaking of the symmetry. It suggests that spontaneous gauge symmetry breaking is not part of the physics, but an unphysical artefact of the redundancy in description.
Highlights
Particle physics is an outgrowth of nuclear physics, which began in the early 1930s with the discovery of the neutron by Chadwick, the invention of the cyclotron by Lawrence, and the ‘invention’ of meson theory by Yukawa (Y. Nambu, 2007)
Theory presents no clue as to how heavy the Higgs boson could be, except the particle would generate some of the same difficulties it has been designed to solve if its mass were 1TeY, which is approximately 1,000 times the mass of the proton
The Higgs mechanism is generally described as the spontaneous breaking of local gauge symmetry, and the Higgs mechanism furnishes the mass generation of the W and Z gauge bosons in the electroweak theory important physical consequences
Summary
Particle physics is an outgrowth of nuclear physics, which began in the early 1930s with the discovery of the neutron by Chadwick, the invention of the cyclotron by Lawrence, and the ‘invention’ of meson theory by Yukawa (Y. Nambu, 2007). In 1967, Nuclear Physics article, CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research) theorist John Ellis, together with colleagues Mary Gaillard and Dmitri Nanopoulos ended with “an apology and a caution” Their widely cited article titled “A phenomenological profile of the Higgs boson”, concluded with the words: “We apologize for to experiments for not having any idea what is the mass of Higgs boson...and for not being sure of its couplings to other particles, except that they are very small. One important breakthrough was the development of the unified electromagnetic and weak interaction Among other ideas, this was based on the concept of broken symmetries and a mechanism for the provision of mass to the otherwise massless vector bosons of the weak interaction, the so-called Higgs mechanism
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