After symmetry breaking Z and W+ W- decay to elementary particles . Before symmetry breaking they have zero mass and thus cannot decay, but can interact with fields . I am wondering whether this different behavior will affect the distributions at the LHC ion experiments that are studying quark gluon plasma.
The temperature of the plasma reached at LHC is lower than symmetry breaking values, but as this is an average over the plasma particles kinetic energies, the tail of the distribution could be at before symmetry breaking energy.. Maybe in the future high energy colliders this might be enough to leave a measurable effect in the distributions of the production of Z and Ws ..
Edit after finding a reference https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.08562 :
"We compute the leading-order evolution of parton distribution functions for all the Standard Model fermions and bosons up to energy scales far above the electroweak scale, where electroweak symmetry is restored. Our results include the 52 PDFs of the unpolarized proton, evolving according to the SU(3), SU(2), U(1), mixed SU(2) x U(1) and Yukawa interactions. We illustrate the numerical effects on parton distributions at large energies, and show that this can lead to important corrections to parton luminosities at a future 100 TeV collider. "
Which answers my question . This time I checked with "electroweak symmetry restored" (words are important too),
I have asked a simmilar question at https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/478278/detecting-the-electroweak-unification-in-data-of-quark-gluon-plasma .
The same can be said for all types of cross sections, that they would be different for energies before symmetry breaking than the ones after symmetry breaking.
I cannot find related articles in the CERN document server and would be grateful if links can be given.