imsmooth
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I believe I understand how the Higgs field imparts "mass" on a particle. Would someone explain how the existence of the Higgs Field means there has to be a Higgs Particle?
Fixed it.imsmooth said:I should have marked my understanding as "I".
It's the other way around. We have an EM field, and when we quantize it we discover that it supports quantized excitations that we call "photons". There's a pretty decent overview (but not even close to being a substitute for a real textbook) at:Don't photons create their EM field? Isn't the EM field there because of the photons?
It is a counting argument. The massive particles obtain their mass because they "eat" certain degrees of freedom of the Higgs field. At the end this leaves you with one remaining degree of freedom, which shows itself as a dynamical field on its own. After quantizing it, you get a particle from this, similar to how one obtains a photon from an EM-field.imsmooth said:I believe I understand how the Higgs field imparts "mass" on a particle. Would someone explain how the existence of the Higgs Field means there has to be a Higgs Particle?