Recent content by carroza

Thank you for your answer. There are a couple of things from it that i do not understand yet: What is a "vev" ? Why the W/Z bosons, which are associated to weak and electromagnetic interactions, should remain massive if there was no Higgs? What is the link between QCD and W/Z bosons?

It is clear that the mass of the valence quarks is only a small fraction of the mass of the hadrons (for example, the proton). However, I wonder if it would be possible to get massive protons in QCD if the quarks were truly massless. On one hand, for massless quarks, the pions, as...

Thank you for an illuminating reply. So, the fact that the photon is massless is associated mainly to the fact that the Higgs multiplet is a doublet. But then, what does this mean? Is there some higher theory (supersymmetry, superstrings ...), which restricts the representations of the...

The Higgs mechanism can give gauge bosons mass. However, in the electroweak theory, only W and Z get masses, not the photon. Is there any fundamental reason why the photon should remain massless? Considering the experimental limit of the photon mass (2. 10^-16 eV), is there any theory that...

Stationary, and at rest, do not mean the same in QM. A wavefunction is stationary in QM if its probability density does not change with time. This is the case for all the eigenstates of a hamiltonian. Classically, a particle at rest will have a definite position and a definite momentum...

Thank you very much for the references, which were indeeed very useful. Could you tell me which is the present conventional view of confinement? Carroza

What would happen if the fine structure constant alpha was larger? Will charge be confined, as colour is in QCD? A simple argument, based on non-relativistic quantum mechanics, is that the binding energy of an electron in a hidrogen atom is given by E= - 1/2 (alpha)² m_e c². If alpha=2...