Comments on: A diagrammatic hint of masses from the Higgs

By: Nitin Yadav

Nitin Yadav — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 19:30:42 +0000

What are non perturbative objects?

By: Flip Tanedo

Flip Tanedo — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 17:25:16 +0000

Hi Paul, thanks for the kind words. I think the following post addresses your question: E=mc2. Thanks! -F

By: Paul De Rienzo

Paul De Rienzo — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 17:20:08 +0000

As an engineer “growing up” in the second half of the 20th century,a great deal of which was devoted to designing and building nuclear power plants – from their inception, literally, I am spellbound by your current day descriptions and explanations of particle mass and energy. In fact, I just don’t get it — yet!

But tell me, if you will, how would you expect the Einstein of e=mc square,to react to your current day representations of mass-less particles?

Thank you!

By: raghubar singh

raghubar singh — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 17:49:37 +0000

what is relation between gravity and curvature of space ?

By: Mike Delaney

Mike Delaney — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 09:08:49 +0000

Since I am on a roll, I thought i would say that the Big Bang occurred when a vortex of energy laden particles HIT a Super planet. Our existing planets are simply fragments of that Super planet and the stars are simply pieces that haven’t yet cooled.

By: Mike Delaney

Mike Delaney — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 08:39:53 +0000

A real big Bang can only occur, in a vortex, when super speed particles come in contact with a solid mass.

What happens when we create a vortex of higher frequency particles (bluer parts of the electromagnetic spectrum?? I only know light but know it is only a small part of the spectrum). Seems like REAL energy is to be found there.

By: Mike Delaney

Mike Delaney — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 08:15:04 +0000

I am a layman.
I am interested in vorticies. Is the reason the black hole is black, because we are exceeding the speed of light???

By: Capnaux

Capnaux — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 22:51:11 +0000

Good Q! Because it’s not reacting to “mass” per se; it’s that space-time itself is curved (or warped) so severely around a black hole that even something going the speed of light can’t “outrun” the curve and escape.

By: Flip Tanedo

Flip Tanedo — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 23:21:44 +0000

Hi Martin! My apologies for the long delay before getting to your question, I was away traveling. I don’t think it’s accurate to associate the Higgs interaction with friction or that one should think of a Higgs rest frame. For the latter point, perhaps a decent analogy would be the cosmological constant—there’s no “cosmological constant” rest frame. (Just don’t try to take this analogy much further, the point is just that there’s a background Higgs value which is—I believe—Lorentz invariant.)

The usual Higgs boson—the particle that we’d like to produce at the LHC—interacts via a Yukawa interaction, which is effectively the same way that physicists in the 50s modeled the interactions between baryons and mesons. The subtle things are the interactions which induce a particle mass. These are interactions with the Higgs vacuum expectation value (see my recent post) which do not transfer any momentum. It’s kind of a weird idea. In fact, usually when grad students first learn this there’s a bit of sleight of hand so that they don’t usually think about mass in this way.

I hope that helps—apologies if my answer is a bit vague.
-F

By: Martin Pavlicek

Martin Pavlicek — Sat, 21 May 2011 21:58:03 +0000

Maybe I don’t understand the explanation deep enough, but for me there is one more big elephant in the room. If Higgs is interacting with some particles, it is then actually representaing a friction. Thus particles should slow down and finally stop (with respect to some weird Higgs reference frame). But the Higgs interaction should happen only when I’m trying to accelerate particles. Because only during acceleration I feel the resistance of mass. Higgs must somehow identify if a particle is accelerated or not and then start doing its job. How does this happen?

By: Flip Tanedo

Flip Tanedo — Tue, 17 May 2011 19:30:05 +0000

Great question, David! The Higgs does not directly interact with photons, however, it does interact with quarks and [charged] leptons, which in turn interact with photons. A good exercise is to draw this diagram. (Hint: it’s the same diagram for Higgs to gluon coupling.) As to why the Higgs can ‘indirectly’ couple to photons and not give them mass, the reason is a bit subtle. Unfortunately I’m not sure if I can explain it at the appropriate level for the blog—which means (as Feynman once said) that perhaps I don’t understand it deeply enough. The semi-technical explanation is that the particular kind of interaction between the Higgs and two photons (also two gluons) is not the sort that gives the mass term. In fancy words it couples through a quantum anomaly (triangle diagram). I’ll try to think further if I can give a better explanation. Thanks for the great question.

By: David

David — Tue, 17 May 2011 19:06:56 +0000

If the Higgs doesn’t interact with photons, then why is the H -> two photons decay channel one of the ones that is talked about as a search target at the LHC? Is that because it is a 3-pt instead of 2-pt interaction, so there is no mass term, and this is the next lowest diagram?

By: flashgordon

flashgordon — Sat, 07 May 2011 22:20:06 +0000

Well Flip, . . . makes me wonder about mass, energy, and gravity. Thanks for the reply;

By: Mario.

Mario. — Sat, 07 May 2011 21:00:30 +0000

And at the end of the day all you have ever observed, lived and believed in is a lie. Even the cake.
Cake is a lie.

I made another observation earlier – regarding flavours, colours etc… it can be mechanical analogy of degrees of freedom in mechanics. We have axes x, y, z, a, b, c. Thus particles can be imagined and manufactured as mechanical models which will or will not couple the same as the real ones. Together – when we consider the time granularity experiment – adds a little bit to the existential anxiety: where are we? WHAT IS this place? Why is it so big? Is there a space granularity too? What does this mean? Do we really consist of only state variables in a PL/1 style matrix?

Curiously intimidating, fear inducing our material world is.

By: Flip Tanedo

Flip Tanedo — Sat, 07 May 2011 03:23:08 +0000

Excellent question, Flash! The answer is that gravity couples not only to mass, but to energy. Photons have no mass, but because they have energy, they feel the curvature of spacetime. Alternately (and equivalently), they interact with gravitons.

The bottom line is that the “charge” that gravity couples to is total energy, not just rest mass.

Cheers,
F