2018/04/30 by Kei-Ichi Kondo
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Gauge boson #Gauge symmetry #Gauge theory #Higgs boson #Higgs mechanism #Kinetic term #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Quantum and Classical Electrodynamics #Scalar (mathematics) #Scalar field #Scalar field theory #Spontaneous symmetry breaking #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1140/epjc/s10052-018-6051-2
published as Eur. Phys. J. C 78 (2018) 577 · 21 pages, no figures; version published
openalex created_date 2018/04/24 · openalex publication_date 2018/07/01 · arxiv created 2018/07/18 · arxiv updated 2018/08/15 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
For the Yang–Mills theory coupled to a single scalar field in the fundamental representation of the gauge group, we present a gauge-independent description of the Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism by which massless gauge bosons acquire their mass. The new description should be compared with the conventional gauge-dependent description relying on the spontaneous gauge symmetry breaking due to a choice of the non-vanishing vacuum expectation value of the scalar field. In this paper we focus our consideration on the fundamental scalar field which extends the previous work done for the Yang–Mills theory with an adjoint scalar field. Moreover, we show that the Yang–Mills theory with a gauge-invariant mass term is obtained from the corresponding gauge-scalar model when the radial degree of freedom (length) of the scalar field is fixed. The result obtained in this paper is regarded as a continuum realization of the Fradkin–Shenker continuity and Osterwalder–Seiler theorem for the complementarity between Higgs regime and Confinement regime which was given in the gauge-invariant framework of the lattice gauge theory. Moreover, we discuss how confinement is investigated through the gauge-independent Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism by starting with the complementary gauge-scalar model.