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To: AndrewC
And no photons?

That's right. Photons as such exist only below the electroweak breaking scale; they are really a low-energy mixture of two fundamental electroweak bosons. From Introduction to High Energy Physics by Donald H. Perkins, 3rd Edition, p. 322:

The fundamental vector bosons are a massless isovector triplet Wmu = Wmu(1), Wmu(2), Wmu(3) (for SU(2)) and a massless isosinglet Bmu (for U(1)). As a result of spontaneous symmetry breaking, three bosons (denoted Wmu+, Wmu-, and Zmu0) acquire mass, and one (Amu, the photon) remains massless. These four bosons are combinations of Wmu and Bmu...

(The "mu" is supposed to be a lowercase Greek letter mu.)

Above the electroweak breaking scale, you have W1, W2, W3 and B, which are the fundamental bosons; below that scale, you have W+, W-, Z0, and the photon, which are mixtures.

105 posted on 06/20/2005 12:09:54 PM PDT by Physicist
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To: Physicist
Above the electroweak breaking scale, you have W1, W2, W3 and B, which are the fundamental bosons; below that scale, you have W+, W-, Z0, and the photon, which are mixtures.

Ahh, then there are no fundamental particles, everything is a mixture of massless things and the Higgs boson which is also rather elusive?

107 posted on 06/20/2005 1:56:17 PM PDT by AndrewC (Darwinian logic -- It is just-so if it is just-so)
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