Quantcast
  • Register
PhysicsOverflow is a next-generation academic platform for physicists and astronomers, including a community peer review system and a postgraduate-level discussion forum analogous to MathOverflow.

Welcome to PhysicsOverflow! PhysicsOverflow is an open platform for community peer review and graduate-level Physics discussion.

Please help promote PhysicsOverflow ads elsewhere if you like it.

News

PO is now at the Physics Department of Bielefeld University!

New printer friendly PO pages!

Migration to Bielefeld University was successful!

Please vote for this year's PhysicsOverflow ads!

Please do help out in categorising submissions. Submit a paper to PhysicsOverflow!

... see more

Tools for paper authors

Submit paper
Claim Paper Authorship

Tools for SE users

Search User
Reclaim SE Account
Request Account Merger
Nativise imported posts
Claim post (deleted users)
Import SE post

Users whose questions have been imported from Physics Stack Exchange, Theoretical Physics Stack Exchange, or any other Stack Exchange site are kindly requested to reclaim their account and not to register as a new user.

Public \(\beta\) tools

Report a bug with a feature
Request a new functionality
404 page design
Send feedback

Attributions

(propose a free ad)

Site Statistics

205 submissions , 163 unreviewed
5,082 questions , 2,232 unanswered
5,353 answers , 22,789 comments
1,470 users with positive rep
820 active unimported users
More ...

  Higgs as toponium bootstrap?

+ 5 like - 0 dislike
1414 views

Part 1

It's an old idea that the Higgs boson might be a top-antitop bound state. The standard form of the idea is that this is due to some new force, "topcolor". 

It's also well-known that a QCD quark condensate can in certain respects resemble a Higgs field. In a higgsless standard model, the W and Z bosons would still acquire (MeV) masses, by absorbing the pions. But there would be nothing like yukawa couplings and so the fermions would remain massless.

There have nonetheless been attempts to obtain the Higgs specifically as a QCD bound state (John Moffat, Bruno Machet), but they don't seem to work.

Part 2

Meanwhile, back in the standard model with a Higgs, there is actually a little-noticed "Higgs force" between fermions, due to Higgs boson exchange.

In most situations, it's too weak to matter. But for top quarks up close, the Higgs force can actually rival the strong force, because the top yukawa is so large (of order 1).

When I saw this just now, in a plot by Matt Strassler, I thought, Wow! This Higgs force could be the "something extra" that binds top and antitop into a Higgs... oh, wait...

Part 3

So the idea sounds circular. But the real problem, even if we still suppose that the Higgs is somehow just QCD toponium, is the lack of yukawa couplings. We need yukawa couplings for the fermions to get their masses, and we specifically need a top yukawa coupling for a toponium-Higgs to emerge.

Here I wonder if an answer could come from quantum gravity. Could integrating out gravitational interactions create effective yukawa couplings? And there's also the fact that Shaposhnikov and Wetterich were able to predict the Higgs mass, by supposing that the quartic coupling and its beta function both go to zero at the Planck scale.

The big picture implied is that electroweak symmetry breaking, and all the fermion masses and mixings, derive from a quantum-gravitational perturbation of the SM QCD vacuum.

Part 4

A nice concept, but how to test its viability? I can think of two ways.

First, study something simpler, like top + top/bottom doublet + QCD + gravity, and see if a large effective top yukawa coupling can be obtained.

Second, study the reasoning which has led most particle physicists to conclude from the precision measurements of the Higgs, that it is elementary, because a composite Higgs would need to be highly fine-tuned. How does the "toponium bootstrap Higgs" look from that perspective?

Obviously, I welcome comments.

asked Jan 27, 2016 in Open problems by Mitchell Porter (1,950 points) [ no revision ]

Wouldn't a scale analysis pretty much rule such possibility out? Below TeV gravity seems way too weak to produce anything noticeable.

The idea was that the yukawas are generated at the Planck scale, and then run to their observed values. I believe that under asymptotic safety, e.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.5023, the yukawas all vanish at the Planck scale, so there may be a precedent for this idea.

I have lately discovered the work of She-Sheng Xue, which has some similarities with what I suggested, e.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/1605.01266.

Your answer

Please use answers only to (at least partly) answer questions. To comment, discuss, or ask for clarification, leave a comment instead.
To mask links under text, please type your text, highlight it, and click the "link" button. You can then enter your link URL.
Please consult the FAQ for as to how to format your post.
This is the answer box; if you want to write a comment instead, please use the 'add comment' button.
Live preview (may slow down editor)   Preview
Your name to display (optional):
Privacy: Your email address will only be used for sending these notifications.
Anti-spam verification:
If you are a human please identify the position of the character covered by the symbol $\varnothing$ in the following word:
p$\hbar$ysicsOv$\varnothing$rflow
Then drag the red bullet below over the corresponding character of our banner. When you drop it there, the bullet changes to green (on slow internet connections after a few seconds).
Please complete the anti-spam verification




user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required

Your rights
...