mitchell porter
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I have looked more closely at papers by Cabo (comment #186) and have mixed news. There were some impressive-looking tables of predicted masses in early papers, but it turned out that these were still assuming the usual current masses; the tables just showed the pole mass for the proposed modified quark propagator, which was basically the same as the Lagrangian mass for heavy quarks, but close to the constituent mass for light quarks. The use of a "democratic" ansatz only managed to produce a heavy top and heavy bottom and everything else massless, which might be OK for a first step, but it's still far from a cascade of Koide triplets...
However, the most recent paper in this program managed to predict a mass-generating scalar of mass 126 GeV! I do not understand how it was done, and even the author writes of wanting to get the mass closer to 114 GeV, where there had been a spurious Higgs sighting. It's always interesting when the theory knows better than its creator...
The theoretical difference between this modified perturbative QCD, and the usual sort, seems to be the presence of gluons in the asymptotic states. So these are quark propagators dressed by a gluon condensate. This aspect of the work (as opposed to the idea of predicting quark masses) was taken up by another physicist, Paul Hoyer, and Hoyer's work was cited e.g. in a QCD review by Chris Quigg in 2011...
I think one might want to view this - I mean the full program of obtaining quark masses from QCD plus condensates - as a type of bootstrap approach, in the 1960s sense. As Ron Maimon points out, string theory came from the bootstrap, so it's conceivable that "SM from bootstrap" leads also to a type of string theory...
Something which I do find lacking in the Cabo papers so far, is anything to do with the weak interaction, and especially the combination of left-handed weak doublets with right-handed weak singlets, which are crucial to the generation of mass in the SM. I have no idea how to make a chiral gauge theory "emergent" from a "bootstrap".
edit: I've had a closer look at the "126 GeV" paper. Version 1 dates from June 2010 and "predicts" a scalar field with a mass of 113 GeV. Version 2 dates from February 2011, and "predicts" 126 GeV. The different "predictions" are obtained by varying a scale parameter μ in a way that I do not see explained. It's just, "let's consider what happens for this value of μ, no wait, let's consider this other value of μ". And February 2011 is getting close in time to the observation of the Higgs - though even as early as 2007, there were estimates (page 2 here) based on electroweak measurements, which put the central value of the Higgs mass at 129 GeV, but with large uncertainties - so perhaps one can't presume that version 2 was motivated by inside information.
However, the most recent paper in this program managed to predict a mass-generating scalar of mass 126 GeV! I do not understand how it was done, and even the author writes of wanting to get the mass closer to 114 GeV, where there had been a spurious Higgs sighting. It's always interesting when the theory knows better than its creator...
The theoretical difference between this modified perturbative QCD, and the usual sort, seems to be the presence of gluons in the asymptotic states. So these are quark propagators dressed by a gluon condensate. This aspect of the work (as opposed to the idea of predicting quark masses) was taken up by another physicist, Paul Hoyer, and Hoyer's work was cited e.g. in a QCD review by Chris Quigg in 2011...
I think one might want to view this - I mean the full program of obtaining quark masses from QCD plus condensates - as a type of bootstrap approach, in the 1960s sense. As Ron Maimon points out, string theory came from the bootstrap, so it's conceivable that "SM from bootstrap" leads also to a type of string theory...
Something which I do find lacking in the Cabo papers so far, is anything to do with the weak interaction, and especially the combination of left-handed weak doublets with right-handed weak singlets, which are crucial to the generation of mass in the SM. I have no idea how to make a chiral gauge theory "emergent" from a "bootstrap".
edit: I've had a closer look at the "126 GeV" paper. Version 1 dates from June 2010 and "predicts" a scalar field with a mass of 113 GeV. Version 2 dates from February 2011, and "predicts" 126 GeV. The different "predictions" are obtained by varying a scale parameter μ in a way that I do not see explained. It's just, "let's consider what happens for this value of μ, no wait, let's consider this other value of μ". And February 2011 is getting close in time to the observation of the Higgs - though even as early as 2007, there were estimates (page 2 here) based on electroweak measurements, which put the central value of the Higgs mass at 129 GeV, but with large uncertainties - so perhaps one can't presume that version 2 was motivated by inside information.
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