An alternative view on the electroweak interactions

We discuss an alternative to the Higgs mechanism which leads to gauge invariant masses for the electroweak bosons. The key idea is to reformulate the gauge invariance principle which, instead of being applied as usual at the level of the action, is applied at the level of the quantum fields. In other words, we define gauge invariant quantum fields which are used to build the action. In that framework, the Higgs field is not necessarily a physical degree of freedom but can merely be a dressing field that does not propagate. If the Higgs boson is not propagating, the weak interactions must become strongly coupled below 1 TeV and have a non-trivial fixed point and would thus be renormalizable at the non-perturbative level. On the other hand, if a gauge invariant Higgs boson is introduced in the model, its couplings to the fermions and the electroweak bosons can be quite different from those expected in the standard model.Comment: 10 page

On the Energetics of the HCO+^+ + C →\to CH+^+ + CO Reaction and Some Astrochemical Implications

We explore the energetics of the titular reaction, which current astrochemical databases consider open at typical dense molecular (i.e., dark) cloud conditions. As is common for reactions involving the transfer of light particles, we assume that there are no intersystem crossings of the potential energy surfaces involved. In the absence of any such crossings, we find that this reaction is endoergic and will be suppressed at dark cloud temperatures. Updating accordingly a generic astrochemical model for dark clouds changes the predicted gas-phase abundances of 224 species by greater than a factor of 2. Of these species, 43 have been observed in the interstellar medium. Our findings demonstrate the astrochemical importance of determining the role of intersystem crossings, if any, in the titular reaction.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ; 14 pages, 2 figures, and 1 tabl