Higgs field

[lcwelch]

One can measure the gravitation field by its interaction with mass. One can measure the electric field by its interaction with a charged particle. How does one measure the Higgs field? Is the Higgs field constant thru-out the universe? If not, what causes any differences?

[Ben6993]

Say there were three generations of the higgs boson. Switching to an analogy of the higgs field being like like a medium to hinder passage, say as water, treacle and mercury respectively. Or as three rooms filled with table tennis balls, baseballs and medicineballs respectively. A person moving through these three rooms would be impeded more by medicine balls than by table tennis balls and therefore may possibly seem to be more massive in the medicineball room? Or would (the field of) an inherently small mass particle tend to interact more with (the field of) the lighter mass higgs boson and not interact much with the heavier generations of higgs? Also, could a single room have a mixture of types of sports balls/higgs bosons?

[friend]

Particles don't get mass from the higgs boson. They get mass from the higgs field. So how many higgs bosons there are does not determine the 3 generations of particle masses. Yet the higgs field can not be constant because the higgs boson is a quantum fluctuation of the higgs field.

[lcwelch]

Since the Higgs field is what gives particles mass, if the Higgs field was not constant would not particles have different masses dependent on where they were?

[FrediFizzx]

All that we are pretty sure of at this point is that the Higgs mechanism gives mass to the heavy gauge bosons. While elementary fermions could get their mass from the Higgs, all the different couplings necessary remain unexplained. I would suspect that the Higgs field would be constant through out the Universe.

[friend]

Some people have suggested that the higgs field is also the inflaton field that gave rise to inflation in the early universe. I suppose it is because both have a potential verses field that starts out non-zero for zero field and falls off to some minimum energy at non-zero field. If this is the case, then the higgs field would not necessarily always be zero everywhere at all times.

[Ben6993]

Some comments now but maybe more later on my preon thread. I will give a pointer to it here if/when ready.

Yes Friend, I agree that the higgs field is the mass giving mechanism not the higgs particle. (However a higgs+ boson [with weak isospin = 0.5] can interact with a left-handed muon [with w.i. = -0.5], for example, and convert it to a RH muon [w.i. = zero].)

IMO a boson should be treated like a particle inasmuchas a particle cannot change form except at an interaction. There are two forms of higgs boson, one with -0.5 weak isospin and one with +0.5 weak isospin and I suggest that they are fixed at that form until they interact as particles/bosons. Field interactions do not permanently change particle or boson forms. For me, that means for field interactions, a LH muon [w.i. = -0.5) will oscillate between w.i. = -0.5 and zero while the Higgs+ [w.i.= 0.5] will simultaneously oscillate between 0.5 and zero, so that their combined w.i. is always net zero.

Penrose's CCC, for cosmology, seems ideal for unravelling contents of elementary particles at interactions. To unravel a knotted ball of string one teases strands apart rather than tightening the knot further to a point. But in the CCC the end of cycle corresponds to a cold expanded space where there are no fermions left [all matter teased completely apart], so the metric is lost because all the contents are bosonic occupying a single BEC state which restarts the metric at a point.

If there are three generations of higgs, there could be three different fields of higgs. And by field I mean the condition in which the, say, H+ boson is in between interactions. That is, I trust, distinguishable from the vacuum states, or Dirac sea or whatever form. From the vacuum can emerge particle-antiparticle pairs. If you include both LH and RH forms for an electron and positron and sum their preon contents one gets a neutral bag of preons. Neutral meaning that there is no overall net property (i.e. no net Q, spin or w.i.). Now is this a genuine quantisation/bag or just a bunch of preons scooped out of a random mix of preons in a preon sea? I.e is it like the particle which cannot change its contents until a further interaction, or is it just a random scoop of preons? If it is a quantised, not-to-be-separated bag, then that would imply that there is a connection between the electron and positron after their pair creation. But to avoid spooky long distance effects I assume that the only quantisation is for single particles or bosons. So that implies that the higgs field is not the total bag, lying in a preon sea, that could give H+ and H- simultaneously, as that would require quantising something which I have just argued is not quantised.

Another reason not to quantise the total bag (containing simultaneously, say, the LH e-, RH e-, LH e+ and RH e+) is that that same bag could also, in my preon model, exactly provide the LH and RH neutrinos and antineutrinos, and ditto for the up quarks, and down quarks, and higgs. Just quantising that bag would not be enough to identify Higg boson properties, or electron properties, or ... .

[Yablon]

...Is the Higgs field constant thru-out the universe? If not, what causes any differences?

Good question Lester, but no. Your question itself contains its answer: A field by definition is a function of space and time. The Higgs field is introduced into scalar field theory using the expansion . It is the vev v which is constant (based on the assumption that the Fermi constant G_F from which it is uniquely determined is constant), and the masses of particles are equal to this vev times a dimensionless coupling constant. We presently have a theoretical basis for explaining the magnitude of this coupling for spin 1 bosons. At present it is not known how to explain the magnitude of this coupling for spin 1/2 fermions. If we did have an explanation for the fermion coupling, we would have an explanation for the fermion masses, and that is one of the most important unsolved problems in physics.

Jay