All Questions
6
questions
46
votes
3
answers
9k
views
What role does "spontaneous symmetry breaking" play in the "Higgs Mechanism"?
In talking about Higgs mechanism, the first part is always some introduction to the concept of spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB), some people saying that Higgs mechanism is the results of SSB of ...
- 6,095
6
votes
5
answers
1k
views
Problems with putting mass on Yang-Mills theory by hand
When Yang-Mills field theory was introduced, a problem is that the gauge invariance can not allow mass for the gauge field. Later people invented spontaneous symmetry breaking and Higgs mechanism to ...
- 6,401
7
votes
1
answer
833
views
Vacuum expectation value (VEV) of a Gauge theory - Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking (SSB) - Higgs Mechanism
I am dealing with a sort of scalar QED with a term of SSB
\begin{equation}
\mathcal{L}=\left|D_{\mu} \phi\right|^{2}-\frac{1}{4}\left(F_{\mu \nu}\right)^{2}-V\left(\phi^{*} \phi\right)
\end{equation}
...
- 900
5
votes
0
answers
164
views
Intuition/Motivation behind necessity of Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking to generate massive gauge bosons
In field theory textbooks, it is shown that while any gauge invariant Lagrangian must involve massless gauge fields, to obtain massive gauge bosons, we must postulate the existence of a Higgs scalar ...
- 1,588
4
votes
1
answer
326
views
Local guage symmety implies causality
I read in a QFT book that local gauge symmetry implies causality. Could someone please explain that statement and why it's true?
Thank you.
- 3,447
2
votes
0
answers
129
views
What is the current theoretical and experimental understanding of the mass of the photon? [duplicate]
To what extend are we allowed to claim that the photon has some sort of mass, below some threshold. We certainly have no experimental evidence that the photon is completely massless, but, due to the ...
- 3,992