Guest Editor’s Introduction: An Overview of the Epistemological Perspectives on the Higgs Mechanism
Guest Editor’s Introduction: An Overview of the Epistemological Perspectives on the Higgs Mechanism
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DOI：
10.1007/s10838-014-9256-6
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发表时间：
2014-08
影响因子：
1
通讯作者：
Koray Karaca
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Koray Karaca
这一特别部分汇集了三篇文章，试图阐明希格斯机制的认识论和本体论基础，以及超越基本粒子物理的“标准模型”的模型发展的认识动力学。1本导言将简要概述有关希格斯机制基础的关键问题。从历史上看，希格斯机制的主要动机来自于需要解释杨-米尔斯型规范理论中弱相互作用的中间矢量玻色子(IVB)的非零质量。给IVB赋予质量的一种方法，称为“显式对称破缺”，是将质量项直接加到规范理论的拉格朗日量中。然而，这破坏了规范理论可重整化所必需的局域规范不变性，即在数学上是一致的，并可预测到任意高的能量。希格斯机制是一种“自发对称性破缺”(SSB)机制，它提供了一种在不破坏局域规范不变性和规范理论重整化的情况下产生IVB质量的方法。SSB是一个起源于二十世纪上半叶凝聚态物理背景下的概念(见Brown和CaO，1991)。20世纪60年代初，Nambu和Jona-Lasinio(1961a，b)的工作将SSB引入量子场论，用于描述物理系统的拉格朗日在基态(或真空态)中不表现出一定对称性的情况。Nambu和Jona-Lasinio利用SSB建立了一个强相互作用的动力学模型，其中核子的质量是通过自发打破手征对称性而产生的。这是类比的
The present special section brings together three articles that seek to elucidate the epistemological and ontological foundations of the Higgs mechanism, as well as the epistemic dynamics of the development of the models beyond the ‘‘standard model’’of elementary particle physics. 1 This introduction will provide a brief overview of the key issues concerning the foundations of the Higgs mechanism. Historically, the main motivation for the Higgs mechanism stemmed from the need to account for the non-zero masses of the intermediate vector bosons (IVBs) of the weak interaction within a gauge theory of the Yang-Mills type. One way to give mass to the IVBs, called ‘‘explicit symmetry breaking,’’is to add mass terms directly to the Lagrangian of the gauge theory. However, this spoils local gauge invariance that is necessary for the gauge theory to be renormalizable, ie, mathematically consistent and predictive up to arbitrarily high energies. The Higgs mechanism is a mechanism of ‘‘spontaneous symmetry breaking’’(SSB) that provides a means to generate the masses of the IVBs without spoiling the local gauge invariance and thus the renormalizability of the gauge theory. SSB is a concept that originated in the context of condensed matter physics in the first-half of the twentieth century (see Brown and Cao 1991). In the early years of the 1960s, SSB was adapted by the works of Nambu and Jona-Lasinio (1961a, b) to quantum field theory to describe the situation in which a certain symmetry of the Lagrangian of a physical system is not manifest in the ground (or vacuum) state. Nambu and Jona-Lasinio used SSB to construct a dynamical model of the strong interaction, where the mass of the nucleon was generated through the spontaneous breaking of the ‘‘chiral symmetry.’’This was in analogy