We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010
A central feature of the Standard Model is the spontaneous symmetry breaking in the electroweak sector which gives mass to fermions and to the W± and Z0 gauge bosons. The sole physical remnant of this process is the Higgs boson. Although its couplings to the other particles in the theory are fully specified, the Higgs mass is undetermined. As a consequence, efforts to detect this particle cover the widest possible range of mass values [GuHKD 90, Ei 91].
Mass and couplings of the Higgs boson
Although a complex doublet of Higgs fields is initially introduced in the Weinberg–Salam model, there remains following spontaneous symmetry breaking precisely one physical Higgs state, a neutral scalar particle H0. That is, if we define the number of degrees of freedom for Higgs and gauge boson states respectively as NH and NG, then before the symmetry breaking we have NH = 4, NG = 8 whereas afterwards we find NH = 1, NG = 11. To obtain these values, recall that massive vector particles have three spin components whereas massless vector particles have just two. Although the total of Higgs and gauge-boson degrees of freedom remains fixed (NH + NG = 12), there is a transfer of three states from the Higgs sector to the gauge-boson sector. These Higgs states become the longitudinal spin modes of the W±, Z0 particles.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
