Daniel Dominguez / CERN
Artist’s concept of a Brout-Englert-Higgs Field
New theoretical work suggests that nature’s fundamental behavior may arise directly from the structure of spacetime, pointing to geometry as the common origin of physical interactions.
A new study presents a way to bypass the Higgs field as the source of particle masses, offering a new tool for understanding how the Higgs field itself may have arisen.
presented in an article published in Nuclear Physics Bopens possible ways to respond to some of the gaps persistent in the Standard Model of particle physics, and suggests that the masses of fundamental particles like the Z and W bosons may have origin in “twisted” geometry of hidden dimensions.
“From our perspective, matter emerges from the resistance of geometry itselfand not from an external field”, explains the theoretical physicist Richard Pinčákresearcher at the Slovak Academy of Sciences and first author of the study, at .
O field of Higgs was initially proposed in the 1960s by , as an explanation for the reason why fundamental particles have mass – a major problem that made it difficult to build a coherent model for particle physics. It was, in part, thanks to the Higgs field that physicists were able to structure the Standard Model we currently rely on.
Here’s how it works: imagine that the Universe is filled with a substance sticky, which works like an “invisible glue”. Every particle moving through the Universe is also moving through that substance, and every particle interact with her slightly differently.
Particles that interact strongly with this “substance”, as if they were going through mud, behave like “heavy”such as the W and Z bosons. Those that almost do not interact are “light”, like electrons. The photons do not interact at all.
This interaction is known as Higgs mechanism and explains particle masses quite elegantly.
We know that or Higgs field is realbecause your quantum rippleor famous Higgs bosonpopularly known as the ““, was finally discovered in 2012, at the Large Hadron Collider. However, this does not mean that the Higgs mechanism is the whole story.
We still, for example, do not know why the Higgs field has the properties it has. Furthermore, the Higgs solution does not explain dark matter, dark energy, or even because the Higgs field itself exists.
There is information missing somewhere – and Pinčák and his colleagues believe some clues may lie in hidden geometry, according to their study of a 7-dimensional space called variety G2.
One variety is a type of mathematical space “topological”, which locally resembles a Euclidean space in the vicinity of each point; is a general term used for any “shape” that may present curvesfolds or twists.
Physicists often resort to manifolds to describe the geometry of spacetime, or the extra hidden dimensions which are proposed in some theories, such as string theoryexplains .
These spaces may have more directions than usual up-down, left-right and front-back of our daily lives. Some require 7 independent directions. A variety with a specific 7-dimensional structureorganized in a very restricted way, is called variety G2.
The researchers created a new equation, called Ricci-G2 flowwhich allowed them model the temporal evolution of a G2 manifold.
“As in organic systems, such as DNA twist or chirality of amino acids, these extra-dimensional structures can present twist, a kind of intrinsic twist”, explains Pinčák.
“When we let these structures evolve over time, we found that they can stabilize in stable configurations, called solitons. These solitons could provide a purely geometric explanation for phenomena such as spontaneous symmetry breaking.”
One lonely it is like a single, self-sustained wave that can maintain its shape indefinitely. The researchers observed that their G2 strain relaxed precisely for a stable configuration of this type – and that this configuration contained a “twist” which was “imprinted” on the W and Z bosons, producing exactly the same mass attribution effect as the Higgs mechanism.
The results also suggest, in a preliminary way, that the accelerated expansion of the Universe may be linked to the curvature caused by this type of torsion associated with the G2 variety. If this twist behaves like a field, it should manifest particles, just as the Higgs field gives rise to the boson.
The researchers called this hypothetical particle “Torstone” and described how he should behave.
If it exists, Torstone may be detectable in collider anomalies of particles, strange deviations in the cosmic microwave background, and even anomalies in gravitational waves. Its existence is far from being proven, but if the torsion field exists, Now we know where to start looking.
It’s a bold and complex conceptbut so was the Higgs field in its time, and it took almost fifty years to prove its existence.
It is hoped that it will not be necessary to wait so long for answers regarding possible G2 varieties, but for now, this approach promises to pave the way for solutions to some of the most pressing questions.
“Nature often prefers simple solutions“, says Pinčák. “Perhaps the masses of the W and Z bosons do not come from the famous Higgs field, but directly from the geometry of a seven-dimensional space.”
