New Physics?
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The next level..?
Contents |
The 5th Force
The Setup
Look up the equations of general relativity.
Adding a scalar quantity Λ, called the cosmological constant, to the field equations:
-
.
Einstein called this the biggest blunder of his life...
A modern day interpretation:
This leads to the idea, that the vacuum has an intrinsic energy content:
where
is the vacuum energy density.
The Poisson equation for the Newtonian gravitational potential φ incorporating the vacuum density is:
ρr,m is the usual radiation-matter density.
The Solution
A simple model can illustrate the physical effects of this equation.
is the force exerted onto a test particle with mass m0 at the point
in a gravitational field. This defines the field vector
. For the gravitational potential φ and
the following relations hold:
or
.
It can be derived that
.
The general solutions are
.
Substituting
, employing a spherical symmetrical mass distribution
and integrating over a spherical volume with radius r yields
where
and a new term
For
the magnitudes of the forces are thus
- Frel = 2FNewton
and
FΛ = c2m0Λr.
This concludes that relativistic matter generates a gravitational attraction twice as strong as in the Newtonian limit. However, it is also obvious that Λ is the source of an additional long-range force
which acts in the opposite direction of the gravitational force. This repulsive force is sometimes referred to as 'anti-gravity' or the 'fifth force'.
The consequence of it is that galaxies placed twice as far apart as two others will feel the effect of double the repulsive force. So the greater the volume of the universe due to its expansion the faster the expansion will become, i.e. the expansion is accelerated.
This has been recently observer: [1], [2]
The Non-Perturbative Higgs Mechanism
Note that this a tentative idea I came up with in 2001, and probably gets a high score on the Crackpot index ;-)
The Idea
Take the math of the Higgs mechanism but don't interpret it within a perturbative quantum field theory framework. This means that there is
which, by the way, I bet won't be found at the LHC. The interpretation of what the Higgs mechanism then is, should perhaps be best framed along the lines of The Mathematical Universe, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, and perhaps A New Kind of Science.
To quote (arXiv:hep-th/0304245v2)
It is important to stress that there is a logical difference
between the Higgs mechanism and the existence of the Higgs particle: the latter provides an elegant and simple
implementation of the former. [...] Nevertheless, let us emphasize right away that all efforts to implement
the Higgs mechanism of the standard model without a physical Higgs boson have failed so far.
Look up some equations of the Higgs mechanism.
The Recipe
- Parameterization of φ. The four degrees of freedom stay unchanged, 4φ.
- Taking unitary gauge. Three degrees of freedom vanish but reappear as polarizational degrees of freedom as the result of the Higgs mechanism,
.
- Taking the vacuum expectation value, i.e., the spontaneous symmetry breaking,
, i. e.
.
- Substitution of
into the Lagrangian.
Note that this procedure never used the perturbative ansatz
which yields a physical Higgs field h. Note for the vacuum expectation values:
and
The Results
No Physical Higgs Boson
There is no Higgs particle in this framework. It will be interesting to see if the as yet unobserved Higgs boson will be detected at CERN's LHC anytime in 2007 or not...
The Same Mass Terms
The idea of the Higgs mechanism was to give a process for the generation of boson and fermion mass terms from the invariant Lagrangian of the Standard Model describing massless gauge bosons interacting with massless fermions.
The non-perturbative interpretation of the Higgs mechanism generates the same mass terms from
:
- mγ = 0
Additional Terms
In the standard version of the Higgs mechanism, all other terms originate from v + h in
:
- − λHv2h2,
,
- μ2vh,
- − λHv3h,
- − λHvh3,
,
,
.
The first term is identified as the Higgs particle's mass
.
The problem is that λH, giving the characteristics of the scalar potential, cannot be derived from the theory itself. All the other terms are ignored due to being 'unphysical'.
In the non-perturbative interpretation, the only additional terms are the last two terms seen above:
,
.
Very Interesting...
The two higher order terms in the non-perturbative Higgs mechanism can be combined:
This term can be interpreted as an effective energy density
Recalling these equations, this implies an effective cosmological constant (in natural units) of the form
