23 December 2010

Weinberg and the Higgs boson

In the December 2010 issue of Scientific American, Weinberg is asked: Does the standard model require the Higgs boson? He answers more or less: [the standard model] requires SU(2) to be broken.

In other words, the standard model does NOT require the Higgs boson. Wow, this is quite a blow to many people, and to their prejudices. Let us see what results all the ongoing experiments will bring us.

7 comments:

  1. I wonder if we can call Fig. 2 and Fig. 3 in [1] asymptotically safe? ;-)

    [1] "On probing small distances in quantum world" at http://groups.google.com/group/qed-reformulation

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  2. Sorry, I do not see the figures on that link.

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  3. Figures are in the pdf file "On probing small distances in quantum world" amongst other files.

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  4. Asymptotic safety is something that plays a role in at distances around 10^-35 m. Your pictures differ from the standard model; so far there is no experimental data showing differences from the standard model!

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  5. So you did not notice any difference between 1/r and U(r) at short distances, did you?

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  6. Yes, I did note the difference, as I wrote above. If these pictures are meant as analogies for what you conjecture to happen in nature, my comment remains: such ideas differ from the standard model; but so far, there is no experimental data showing differences from the standard model, and thus the conjecture is not really successful.

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  7. Thanks, Nemo, for clarifying your attitude. I am not against the SM results but against the way they are currently obtained (via renormalization and IR problem resolving). What I am looking for is a natural short-cut to those results. I think it is possible to achieve with better physical constructions where an essential part of coupling is taken into account exactly - via intrinsically compound entities.

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