4 ms·

Thanks! So if I understood you right, whatever coupling does to the fields, it's something doesn't involve virtual Higgs, is that right? Is it fair to say that

by tux3 3y ago

Thanks! So if I understood you right, whatever coupling does to the fields, it's something doesn't involve virtual Higgs, is that right? Is it fair to say that both virtual Higgs and 'real' Higgs are two types of excitations of that field, except that virtual particles can't be directly observed? I find the name virtual particles interesting, since they don't seem to be exactly the same kind of ripples as particles, and physicists frequently seem to disagree on how 'real' they are as a matter of interpretation

lanza 3y ago
Virtual particles are calculational tools. They aren’t concrete things the way you’re proposing them to be. They are closer in character to “completing the square” than they are a an actual physical object. They are great for trying to help human brains make concrete the details of the process. But again they are just artifacts of the way we do our computations. And the Higgs field is a particularly great example of this. If you shift a sin wave 90 degrees it becomes a cosine wave. If you don’t expand about the lowest energy of the Mexican top hot potential for the Higgs field it creates an entirely different description of the physical phenomena and virtual particles.
- ethbr0 3y ago
  > Mexican top hot potential To save someone else the trouble, no, that wasn't an autocorrect mistake on "Mexican." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_symmetry_breaking#Sombrero_potential https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_symmetry_breakin...
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    It's not the "Mexican" bit that looks like a typo; it's the "top hot" part that jumps out.
    - lanza 3y ago
      It's just "Mexican hat" potential. The `hot` was a phone keyboard typo and writing `top` was just a mental typo.