The evanescence of rest masses and electric charge in black holes

TL;DR

This paper explores how, near Schwarzschild black holes, the Higgs field's symmetry breaking can vanish, causing particles to lose their mass and charge as they approach the black hole, due to a modified Higgs mechanism.

Contribution

It demonstrates that in certain black hole conditions, the Higgs field's symmetry breaking is suppressed, leading to massless and chargeless particles near the black hole horizon.

Findings

Higgs symmetry breaking ceases beyond a critical mean curvature.

Particles lose mass and charge near black holes due to symmetry restoration.

The Higgs mechanism can reverse in strong gravitational fields.

Abstract

The classical Einstein-Standard Model system with conformally invariant coupling of the Higgs field to gravity is investigated in nearly Schwarzschild black holes. We show that, in the presence of Kantowski-Sachs symmetries, there is a finite critical value of the mean curvature such that on spacelike hypersurfaces with greater mean curvature the Higgs sector does not have any symmetry breaking vacuum state. Hence, according to the Standard Model of particle physics, the gauge and spinor fields do not have rest mass and electric charge. Therefore, particles falling into a nearly Schwarzschild black hole lose their mass and charge in the "reverse" Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism.