🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4NOV199211145034@csa1.lbl.gov> sichase@csa1.lbl.gov (SCOTT I CHASE) writes:
>
>Loosely speaking, the particle has some drag as it moves through the 
>Higgs field, which gives it an appearance which we interpret as "the particle 
>has inertia corresponding to a mass M."  But the mass is not an intrinsic
>property of the particle - if you could turn off the Higgs (remove all Higgs's
>from the Universe) then all particles would be massless.  So it makes no
>sense to try to say where the mass of a particle is.
>
Not wanting to detract from your well-stated point, but if you turned off
the Higgs in the standard model, the W and Z would not be massless, because
of _dynamical_ symmetry breaking. For instance, in a theory with two quark
flavours, there is an SU(2)_Left x SU(2)_Right symmetry which is broken down
by QCD to diagonal SU(2). This leaves 3 Goldstone bosons --- the pions, which
are "eaten" by the W and Z to give them mass, in the same way that the
unphysical Higgs bosons get "eaten" in the Standard Model.

This doesn't generate realistic W and Z masses, since the mass scale
is set by the QCD scale Lambda_QCD, which is too small. However, it is
the basic idea behind Technicolor theories, where new gauge interactions,
assumed to become strong at 1 TeV,introduced to produce weak boson masses.

Grant Baillie (baillie@uclaph.physics.ucla.edu)
Graduate Student