Is the Higgs Boson a force or just a manifestation of vacuum energy?

[CJames]

I have a question regarding the Higgs Boson/Field/Mechanism. My understanding of QFT is very rudimentary, but as I understand it the Higgs Boson is the quantum of the Higgs Field, which generates the vacuum energy providing the mass of the elementary particles. It assigns mass to bosons causing a symmetry break that separates the three forces: the electromagnetic force, the strong and weak nuclear forces. Those are represented by the photon, the gluon, and the W and Z weak bosons respectively.

My question is whether the Higgs Boson represents a force of its own, as the other bosons do. More specifically, the Higgs field of 246 GeV is supposed to permeate all of space. Is it always equal to this value, or might fluctuations in this value create a force? If so, does this force act upon all particles equally, or is their any equivalent to charge, color, or flavour?

 

[Marco_84]

Without symmetry breaking all the particles don not posses mass in the S.M. theory because the symmetry in the multiplet is perfect only if we think that they have the same mass or zero.
The breaking is a consequence of specific choice of the vacuum state |0>.
As in weinberg-salam model breaking SU(2)xU(1) gives you the correct mass bosons which we expermentally observe (z,w+,w-). Everything comes out from the broken charge Q. You have as many bosons (Goldstone modes) fields as many charge you break.
In the SM you have SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1)... if you break it you have 8+3+1 bosons it is the dimension of the algebra...

What i think is that, yes you can think the higgs as a particle which madiate the "mass force" with every mass particle (the quantum charge in this case is the mass itself)... but what we don't have to forget, using the renormalization scheme, is:

The SM is only a (beautifull) but effective theory.. if you see how it growed you can check that the physicist had so many datas from the experiment that started to work with Group theories and a lot of fantasy to make the data fits.
This is correct, we need a theory that can predict something accesible to our labs... But the SM is not yet a fundamental One.

hope that helped.

regards marco