I'm not a particle physicist, but I did manage to get through the Feynman lectures without getting too lost. Is there a way to explain how the Higgs field works, in a way that people like me might have a hope of understanding?
Answer
The Higgs mechanism is no different from superconductivity, except the condensate responsible for superconductivity is a relativistically invariant scalar field.
If you have a bosonic field, its particles can be in a Bose-Einstein condensate. When this condensate is charged, you call it a superconductor. A photon in a superconductor gets a mass, and this is the Higgs mechanism. For a relativistic boson described by a scalar field, you give the field a constant nonzero value to make a condensate. When the field has charge, this makes a superconducting condensate which gives the gauge boson a mass.
The whole effect is described in detail on the Wikipedia page on the Higgs mechanism, starting from a nonrelativistic superconductivity model of bosonic particles, and continuing analogously to relativistic condensates.
No comments:
Post a Comment