2006/09/14 by M. Consoli, Consoli, M.
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.hep-th/0609101
29 pages, 16 tables
arxiv created 2006/09/14 · openalex publication_date 2006/09/14 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The phenomenon of spontaneous symmetry breaking admits a physical interpretation in terms of the Bose-condensation process of elementary spinless quanta. In a cutoff theory, this leads to a picture of the vacuum as a condensed medium whose excitations might deviate from exact Lorentz covariance in both the ultraviolet and infrared regions. For this reason, the conventional singlet Higgs boson, the shifted field of spontaneous symmetry breaking, rather than being a purely massive field, might possess a gapless branch describing the long-wavelength fluctuations of the scalar condensate. To test this idea, that might have substantial phenomenological implications, I compare with a detailed lattice simulation of the broken phase in the 4D Ising limit of the theory. The results are the following: i) differently from the symmetric phase, the single-particle energy spectrum is not reproduced by the standard massive form ii) for the value of the hopping parameter κ=0.076, increasing the lattice size from 204 to 324, the mass gap is found to decrease from the value 0.392(1) reported by Balog et al. (see Nucl. Phys. B714 (2005) 256) to the value 0.366(5). Both results confirm that, in the infrared region, the standard singlet Higgs cannot be considered as a simple massive field. Several arguments indicate that, approaching the continuum limit of the lattice theory, the observed volume dependence of the mass gap might require larger and larger lattice sizes before to show up.