1,127 research outputs found
Quantum-hydrodynamical picture of the massive Higgs boson
The phenomenon of spontaneous symmetry breaking admits a physical
interpretation in terms of the Bose-condensation process of elementary spinless
quanta. In this picture, the broken-symmetry phase emerges as a real physical
medium, endowed with a hierarchical pattern of scales, supporting two types of
elementary excitations for k \to 0: a massive energy branch E_a(k) \to M_H,
corresponding to the usual Higgs boson field, and a collective gap-less branch
E_b(k) \to 0. This is similar to the coexistence of phonons and rotons in
superfluid He-4 that, in fact, is usually considered the condensed-matter
analog of the Higgs condensate.
After previous work dedicated to the properties of the gap-less, phonon
branch, in this paper we use quantum hydrodynamics to propose a physical
interpretation of the massive branch. On the base of our results, M_H coincides
with the energy-gap for vortex formation and a massive Higgs boson is like a
roton in superfluid He-4. Within this interpretation of the Higgs particle,
there is no "naturalness" problem since M_H remains a naturally intermediate,
fixed energy scale, even for an ultimate ultraviolet cutoff Lambda \to \infty.Comment: Latex file, 20 pages, no figure
Is the physical vacuum a preferred frame ?
It is generally assumed that the physical vacuum of particle physics should
be characterized by an energy momentum tensor in such a way to preserve exact
Lorentz invariance. On the other hand, if the ground state were characterized
by its energy-momentum vector, with zero spatial momentum and a non-zero
energy, the vacuum would represent a preferred frame. Since both theoretical
approaches have their own good motivations, we propose an experimental test to
decide between the two scenarios.Comment: 12 pages, no figure
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