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Re: Not quite. Dreaded Anomaly Send a noteboard - 17/06/2010 12:45:06 AM
The EM and strong forces have no Higgs couplings, as their carrier particles (photons and gluons) are massless. There's no proposal of any Higgs with a color charge as far as I'm aware, and definitely not in a SUSY model.

Ah, I see. So are you saying that the Higgs 'clings' to the bosons of a force (in our case, the Weak)? I suppose if it only couples to the Weak, there would certainly be no colour charge.


In a way. The Higgs mechanism was originally developed to explain the masses of the W and Z bosons, and has since been extended to explain the fundamental fermion masses as well (leptons and quarks). It's not so much that the Higgs only couples to the weak force, but that the weak carrier bosons are the only bosons that couple to the Higgs.

One Higgs doublet is actually four particles, three of which get "eaten" by the W+, W-, and Z bosons to generate their masses. (In technical terms, they're Goldstone bosons which provide the longitudinal polarization component; compare with the photon, which is massless and has no longitudinal polarization.) The fourth is what we generally think of as the actual "Higgs boson." If there were two doublets, that pattern would be repeated, so in addition to h, we'd have H+, H-, H, and A. (The A is a bit confusing given that A is usually used for photons in electroweak unification, but that's the convention.)

I'm slightly confused by what you're trying to say here; I follow what you say about the W and Z bosons and then about the actual "Higgs boson", but that only accounts for four Higgs particles. Where does the fifth come in to play?


Perhaps I wasn't clear. The Standard Model doublet consists of the three that get eaten, and the Higgs h. In the theoretical SUSY two-doublet model, a second doublet is added, which consists of H+, H-, H, and A. None of those are eaten, so that brings the total to 5.

I'm at Fermilab this summer (working on CMS, though) and there is definitely a sense of rivalry. The Tevatron can no longer claim the highest energy, but this has just shifted everyone's bragging to focus on luminosity, where it still dominates.

I've always been disappointed that my undergrad was completely missing a particle module. I'm finishing my masters now and I kind of crammed as much particle physics as I could into the year, so I think my knowledge in this area is rushed at best! :P


You could pick up Griffiths' Introduction to Elementary Particles if you want to learn more on your own. He does a good job with most of the Standard Model stuff, but there's not too much on beyond-SM topics (such as the supersymmetric concept we're discussing in this thread).
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