bapowell said:
I think you are quoting the MSSM GUT scale there (supposing your units are GeV). What does SUSY have to do with electroweak symmetry breaking?
the standard model is a good low energy approximation, however it does not explain right hand neutrinos, dark matter, there is also the proton decay problem. How does it even explain the Higg's mass at 125GeV?
the SO(10) (non SUSY) model does cover right hand neutrinos. There is also numerous papers dealing with electro-weak vacuum and how it could potentially tie into inflation.
but according to you the Higgs field is and I quote "off" above the electroweak scale. If that's the case then explain these articles. How can one define OFF when it obviously has influences above 246 GeV? A different Higg's that is a poor argument.
or its off, but its not off when your talking the GUT scale, that doesn't make one iota of sense. Considering the purpose of any particle physics model is to define and explain all the particles and their interactions at any temperature scale, GUT just happens to be one of the goals in that. Their are countless papers that discuss the limitations of the standard model. I've been posting numerous papers throughout this post that all mention the standard model limitations. Why do you think the standard model has extensions?
There is plenty of research going on, that show the Higg's interactions beyond what is defined by the standard model. The first set explains what it has to do with the electro-weak symmetry breaking.
"The exact way particles in the Standard Model obtain mass is a question to which various
answers exist but none has been shown to be true in experiment. One possibility in the
Standard Model is that particles obtain mass through spontaneous symmetry breaking at
the scale of the electroweak force. Spontaneous symmetry breaking can be understood with
a \Mexican hat" depicting a potential for a particle (see figure 1.1) where a ball (particle)
that is initially placed at the tip of the hat (maximum potential, i.e. at high energies) and is
symmetric under rotations takes up a specific value when it tips of the top of the hat into the
rim; the picture is then no longer invariant under rotations. Electroweak symmetry breaking
(EWSB), also called the Higg's mechanism, is the process of spontaneous symmetry breaking
through which gauge bosons in gauge theories acquire their mass. In this mechanism, they do
so through \eating" or absorbing so-called massless Nambu{Goldstone bosons. The simplest
implementation of this mechanism is addition of an extra Higg's field to the Standard Model.
http://phys.onmybike.nl/StrongEWSB.pdf
here is a book on it
"Electroweak Symmetry Breaking and New Physics at the TeV Scale"
http://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/3073
New Approaches to ElectroWeak Symmetry Breaking
http://lpsc.in2p3.fr/GDR-SUSY/tutorial_Annecy06/EWSB_1.pdf
ASI Lectures on Electroweak Symmetry Breaking from Extra Dimensions
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0510275
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9912343
"Electroweak symmetry breaking remains the foremost problem facing elementary particle
physics at this moment. We expect to come to understand it in scientific detail in the
next decade with the Tevatron and the LHC"
http://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-ph/9912343v3.pdf
Implications of LHC results for TeV-scale physics: signals of electroweak symmetry breaking
https://indico.cern.ch/event/173388/material/0/0.pdf
Electroweak Vacuum Stability in light of BICEP2
http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.6786
"Electroweak Vacuum (In)Stability in an Inflationary Universe"
http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.2846
"Higgs mass implications on the stability of the electroweak vacuum"
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1112.3022.pdf