To be honest, answering your second question will be hard. I have very little grasp on how the Higgs works, but I'll give it my best shot. In order for QED to work, they had to postulate the existence of a uniform field throughout space, the Higgs field. This is what gives three of what we see as the weak bosons mass, and leaves the photon massless. In reality the two massless vector bosons mix with each other and create a pair of mass Eigenstates, the massless photon and the massive Z0. This is done by separating terms in the Lagrangian in order to create good observable eigenstates, and takes several pages of algebra.
The Higgs field was designed to couple to particles simply dependent upon their mass. Although I don't know the original intent, the theory works for fermions as well as bosons: objects couple along the order of mparticle2 / mHiggs2. This would normally not be impressive, but the Top is so damn massive that its mass is comparable to that of the Higgs. I don't think anybody knows why it is, but apparently it couples strongly enough that they could make temporary bound states.
No. I don't understand what that means for our detector either. But I hope I answered some of your questions.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-29 02:01 am (UTC)The Higgs field was designed to couple to particles simply dependent upon their mass. Although I don't know the original intent, the theory works for fermions as well as bosons: objects couple along the order of mparticle2 / mHiggs2. This would normally not be impressive, but the Top is so damn massive that its mass is comparable to that of the Higgs. I don't think anybody knows why it is, but apparently it couples strongly enough that they could make temporary bound states.
No. I don't understand what that means for our detector either. But I hope I answered some of your questions.