Voltz said:
If the Higgs is the carrier boson of the Higgs field then I've always wondered why it has mass, because the other gauge bosons don't interact through the force they mediate, the photon has 0 electromagnetic charge, the gluon has no color charge and the hypothetical graviton has no mass, I don't know enough about weak isospin/hypercharge to comment about the W and Z bosons (never understood anything about the weak force). But this confuses me
1) Gauge bosons are the carriers of a
force; and they are
excited states of a field. It isn't meaningful to say that something is the "carrier of a field."
2) The Higgs is not a gauge boson. Gauge boson are necessarily spin-1 (or, if you include the graviton spin-2). To be a gauge boson it is necessary that at least one degree of freedom in the mathematical description actually be physically redundant. For spin-1 this isn't a problem. A spin-1 field has 4 components - 1 in each direction of spacetime - so, having one fewer be physically meaningful still leaves physical degrees of freedom. But, the Higgs is spin-0. This means it has 1 and only 1 component. So, there can't be a gauge-type redundancy.
3) Gauge bosons can, in fact, feel the forces they mediate. Gluons
do carry color charge (in fact each gluon carries both a color charge and a color anti-charge), and the W triplet (in the unbroken phase of the electroweak force) carry weak isospin.
4) In quantum field theory, in general, it is not necessary that everything be fundamentally massless. It is only necessary that gauge bosons be massless and that fermion masses not violate any symmetries. The problem is that fermion mass terms require chiral symmetry and the isospin part of the weak force doesn't obey it. Because of this, fundamental masses for the fermions would actually break the symmetry of the weak force in a way that would make the theory inconsistent. The point here is that it's kind of a fluke that everything in the standard model has to get mass in a dynamical way.
This fluke, however, makes it seem odd that the Higgs field actually does have a fundamental mass parameter, when it really shouldn't be. The Higgs mass is really just a function of that mass parameter combined with the effects of the Higgs' interactions with itself.
