Sunday, January 19, 2020

What's the relationship between weakly hypercharged bosons and Higgs bosons?



In this video, Leonard Susskind does a good job trying to explain succinctly the Higgs field and exactly how it gives elementary fermions mass, except for one point he seems to skip a few things. The weak hypercharge is endearingly called 'zilch' (0:46:00). He goes on to explain how (e.g.) an accelerating electron (or other zilch-charged particle) can emit a $Z$ boson. He then postulates (0:48:16) the existence of a field (none other than a 'ziggs boson condensate'), which (in a similar manner to a uniform electric field giving electric dipoles a potential energy - and therefore an extra mass - that depends on their orientation) gives fermions mass by the Dirac mechanism (explained earlier in the video). He adds how the ('zilch'-less) $Z$ boson also interacts with the 'ziggs' field to intermittently acquire 'zilch' (and becoming itself a 'ziggs'), and lose 'zilch', thereby acquiring mass as well.


At that point, he jumps to the Higgs boson without apparently any connection to the mechanism just explained (he employs different names for the fields). He explains that the Higgs boson is a particular excitation mode of the Higgs field, but what is then the (general) 'ziggs' boson? Are Higgs and ziggs actually the same? The $Z$ boson has been known experimentally for decades, what about its weakly hypercharged product? Does the Higgs boson actually have nothing to do with the Higgs phenomenon, being merely a consequence of the theory that was begging to be discovered experimentally?




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