An alternative view on the electroweak interactions

TL;DR

This paper proposes an alternative to the Higgs mechanism by reformulating gauge invariance at the quantum field level, leading to a different understanding of electroweak symmetry breaking and potential non-perturbative renormalizability.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to gauge invariance that allows the Higgs field to be a non-propagating dressing field, offering a new perspective on electroweak interactions.

Findings

Gauge invariant quantum fields can replace the Higgs field in the action.

If the Higgs boson does not propagate, electroweak interactions become strongly coupled below 1 TeV.

Introducing a gauge invariant Higgs alters its couplings to fermions and gauge bosons from Standard Model predictions.

Abstract

We discuss an alternative to the Higgs mechanism which leads to gauge invariant masses for the electroweak bosons. The key idea is to reformulate the gauge invariance principle which, instead of being applied as usual at the level of the action, is applied at the level of the quantum fields. In other words, we define gauge invariant quantum fields which are used to build the action. In that framework, the Higgs field is not necessarily a physical degree of freedom but can merely be a dressing field that does not propagate. If the Higgs boson is not propagating, the weak interactions must become strongly coupled below 1 TeV and have a non-trivial fixed point and would thus be renormalizable at the non-perturbative level. On the other hand, if a gauge invariant Higgs boson is introduced in the model, its couplings to the fermions and the electroweak bosons can be quite different from those expected in the standard model.