Particles have an inherent spin. We explored the case of fermions (“spin-1/2”) in a recent post on helicity and chirality. Now we’ll extend this to the case of vector (“spin-1”) particles which describe gauge bosons—force particles.
By now regular US LHC readers are probably familiar with the idea that there are two kinds of particles in nature: fermions (matter particles) and bosons (force particles). The matter particles are the ‘nouns’ of the Standard Model. The ‘verbs’ are the bosons which mediate forces between these particles. The Standard Model bosons are the photon, gluon, W, Z, and the Higgs. The first four (the gauge bosons of the fundamental forces) are what we call vector particles because of the way they spin.
An arrow that represents spin
You might remember the usual high school definition of a vector: an object that has a direction and a magnitude. More colloquially, it’s something that you can draw as an arrow. Great. What does this have to do with force particles?
In our recent investigation of spin-1/2 fermions, the punchline was that chiral (massless) fermions either spin clockwise or counter-clockwise relative to their direction of motion. We can convert this into an arrow by identifying the spin axis. Take your right hand and wrap your fingers around the direction of rotation. The direction of your thumb is an arrow that identifies the helicity of the fermion, it is a ‘spin vector.’ In the following cartoon, the gray arrows represent the direction of motion (right) and the big colored arrows give the spin vector.
You can see that a particle has either spin up (red: spin points in the same direction as motion) or spin down (blue: spin points in the opposite direction as motion). It should not surprise you that we can write down a two-component mathematical object that describes a particle. Such an object is called a spinor, but it’s really just a special kind of vector. In can be represented this way:
ψ = ( spin up , spin down )
As you can see, there’s one slot that contains information about the particle when it is spin up and another slot that contains information about the particle when it is spin down. It’s really just a list with two entries.
Don’t panic! We’re not going to do any actual math in this post, but it will be instructive—and relatively painless—to see what the mathematical objects look like. This is the difference between taking a look at the cockpit of a jet versus actually flying it.
All you have to appreciate at this point is that we’ve described fermions (spin-1/2 particles) in terms of an arrow that determine its spin. Further, we can describe this object as a two-component ‘spinor.’
Relativity and spin
Why did we bother writing the spinor as two components? Why not just work with one component at a time: we pick up a fermion and if it’s spin up we use one object and if it’s spin down we use another.
This, however, doesn’t work. To see why, we can imagine what happens if we take the same particle but change the observer. You can imagine driving next to a spin-up particle on the freeway, and then accelerating past it. Relative to you, the particle reverses its direction of motion so that it becomes a spin-down particle.
What does this mean? In order to account for relativity (different observers see different things) we must describe the particle simultaneously in terms of being spin-up and spin-down. To describe this effect mathematically, we would perform a transformation on the spinor which changes the spin up component into the spin down component.
In fact, to a mathematician, this is the whole point of constructing vectors: they’re things which know how to transform properly when you rotate them. In this way they are intimately linked to the symmetries of spacetime: we should know how particles behave when we grab them and rotate them.
Spin-1 (vector) particles
Now that we’ve reviewed spin-1/2 (fermions), let’s move on to spin-1: these are the vector particles and include the gauge bosons of the Standard Model. Unlike the spin-1/2 particles, whose spin arrows must be parallel to the direction of motion, vector particles can have their spin point in any direction. (This is subject to some constraints that we’ll get to below.) We know how to write arrows in three dimensions: you just write down the coordinates of the arrow tip:
3D arrow = (x-component, y-component, z-component)
When we take into account special relativity, however, we must work instead in four dimensional spacetime, i.e. we need a vector with four components (sometimes called a four-vector, see Brian’s recent post). The reason for this is in addition to rotating our vector, we can also boost the observer—this is precisely what we did in the example above where we drove past a particle on the freeway—so that we need to be able to include the length contraction and time dilation effects that occur in special relativity. Heuristically, these are rotations into the time direction.
So now we’ve defined vector particles to be those whose spin can be described by an arrow pointing in four dimensions. A photon, for example, can thus be represented as:
Aμ = (A0, A1, A2, A3)
Here we’ve used the standard convention of labeling the x, y, and z directions by 1, 2, and 3. The A0 corresponds to the component of the spin in the time direction. What does this all mean? The (spin) vector associated with a spin-1 particle has a more common name: the polarization of the particle.
You’ve probably heard of polarized light: the electric (and hence also the magnetic) field is fixed to oscillate along only one axis; this is the basis for polarized sunglasses. Here’s a heuristic drawing of electromagnetic radiation from a dipole (from Wikipedia, CC-BY-SA license):
The polarization of a photon refers to the same idea. As mentioned in Brian’s post, the electric and magnetic fields are given by derivatives of the vector potential A. This vector potential is exactly the same thing that we have specified above; in a sense, a photon is a quantum of the vector potential.
Four vectors are too big
Now we get to a very important point: we’ve argued based on spacetime symmetry that we should be using these four-component vectors to describe particles like photons. Unfortunately, it turns out that four components are too many! In other words, there are some photon polarizations that we could write down which are not physical!
Here we’ll describe one reason why this is true; we will again appeal to special relativity. One of the tenets of special relativity is that you cannot travel faster than the speed of light. Further, we know that photons are massless and thus travel at exactly the speed of light. Now consider a photon with is spinning in the same direction as its motion (i.e. the spin vector is perpendicular to the page):
In this case the bottom part of the photon (blue) is moving opposite the direction of motion and so travels slightly slower than the speed of light. On the other hand, the top part of the photon is moving with the photon and thus would be moving faster than the speed of light!
This is a big no-no, and so we cannot have any photons polarized in this way. Our four-component vector contains more information than the physical photon. Or more accurately: being able to write down our theory in a way that manifestly respects spacetime symmetry comes at the cost of introducing extra, non-physical degrees of freedom in how we describe some of our particles.
(If we removed this degree of freedom and worked with three-component vectors, then our mathematical formalism doesn’t have enough room to describe how the particle behaves under rotations and boosts.)
Fortunately, when we put four-component photons through the machinery of quantum field theory, we automatically get rid of these unphysical polarizations. (Quantum field theory is really just quantum mechanics that knows about special relativity.)
Gauge invariance: four vectors are still too big
Now I’d like to introduce one of the key ideas of particle physics. It turns out that even after removing the unphysical ‘faster than light’ polarization of the photon, we still have too many degrees of freedom. A massless particle only has two polarizations: spin-up or spin-down. Thus our photon still has one extra degree of freedom!
The resolution to this problem is incredibly subtle: some of the polarizations that we could write down using a four-vector are physically identical. I don’t just mean that they give the same numbers when you do the math, I mean that they literally describe the same physical state. In other words, there is a redundancy in this four-vector description of particles! Just as the case of the unphysical polarization above, this redundancy is the cost of writing things in a way which manifestly respects spacetime symmetry. This redundancy is called gauge invariance.
Gauge invariance is a big topic that deserves its own post—I’m still thinking of a good way to present it—but the “gauge” refers to the same thing in term “gauge boson.” This gauge invariance (redundancy in our description of physics) is intimately linked to the fundamental forces of our theory.
Wigner’s classification
Let me take a step back to address the ‘big picture.’ In this post I’ve tried to give a hint of a classification of “irreducible [unitarity] representations of the Poincaré group” by Hungarian mathematical physicist Eugene Wigner in the late 1930s.
At the heart of this program is a definition of what we really mean by ‘particle.’ A particle is something with transforms in a definite way under the symmeties of spacetime, which we call the Poincaré group. Wigner developed a systematic way to write down all of the ‘representations’ of the Poincaré group that describe quantum particles; these representations are what we mean by spin-1, spin-1/2, etc.
In addition to these two examples, there are fields which do nothing under spacetime symmetries: these are the spin-0 scalar fields, such as the Higgs boson. If we treated gravity quantum mechanically, then the graviton would be a spin-2 [antisymmetric] tensor field. If nature is supersymmetric, then the graviton would also have a spin-3/2 gravitino partner. Each of these different spin fields is represented by a mathematical object with different numbers of components that mix into one another when you do a spacetime transformation (e.g. rotations, boosts).
In principle one can construct higher spin fields, e.g. spin-3, but there are good reasons to believe that such particles would not be manifested in nature. These reasons basically say that those particles wouldn’t be able to interact with any of the lower-spin particles (there’s no “conserved current” to which they may couple).
Next time: there are a few other physics (and some non-physics) topics that I’d like to blog about in the near future, but I will eventually get back to this burning question about the meaning of gauge symmetry. From there we can then talk about electroweak symmetry breaking, is the main reason why we need the Higgs boson (or something like it) in nature. (For those who have been wondering why I haven’t been writing about the Higgs—this is why! We need to go over more background to do things properly.)
