One reads of the impact that the discovery of the Higgs Boson could have on the Standard Model. Would its identification and measurement of its properties also have an impact on the efforts to ‘unify gravity with the quantum’?
Two related follow-up questions, please.
How, if at all, does identifying the Higgs Boson explain the Higgs Mechanism?
In the same vein as above, would understanding the Higgs Mechanism have any impact on the efforts to ‘unify gravity with the quantum’.
Many thanks!
The Higgs boson is best thought of as a by-product of the Higgs mechanism. The mechanism is dependent on the Higgs field, and if there’s a field, it should be possible to raise excitations in it. Those excitations, if you manage to raise them, are the bosons. But the field can do its job without being excited, too.
And nothing about the Higgs has any particular connection to gravity at all. The LHC might, however, if we’re very lucky, also be able to produce other things that would relate to gravity, such as microscopic black holes (though I wouldn’t bet on it).
Thanks, and you know I am not doubting you, but could you clarify what you said re: the Higgs having nothing to do with gravity. Since the Higgs field endows particles with their masses, that statement doesn’t make “intuitive sense” to an ignoramus like me. Is this an example of inertial and gravitational masses being equal, with the Higgs endowing intertial mass, and thus gravitational mass, or not even close!
That’s pretty much bang-on, actually. The “mass” that the Higgs gives to other particles is its rest mass — but this only determines the inertial properties of the other particles: how its energy relates to its momentum, say, or how it responds to external forces. On the subject on how particles interact with the curvature of spacetime (which would be closely related to their gravitational mass), the Standard Model is silent, Higgs or no Higgs.
Having clicked on KarlGauss’s second link, and then clicked again, I have now learned that there may also be pseudo-Nambu–Goldstone bosons.
Physics is now officially getting silly.
That’s not silly. Nambu and Goldstone were two dudes’ names, and they predicted the existence of a boson, hence the Nambu-Goldstone boson. And it turns out that that may not exist, but something a lot like it might, hence pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson.
As for the Higgs and mass, the Higgs mechanism is not associated with all mass, or even most of it. It’s believed to be responsible for the quarks, the charged leptons, and the W and Z having mass, and might or might not be responsible for the mass of the neutrinos, but that just says that they have mass, not what the effects of that mass are. Further, most of the mass of a proton or neutron (and hence, most of the mass of all matter we’re familiar with, since that comes almost entirely from protons and neutrons) doesn’t come from the mass of the quarks, but from the strong force binding energy (which has nothing at all to do with the Higgs).
That is amazing! And nicely explained. Thank you.