II.1.5 Higgs Mechanism
Without spontaneous symmetry breaking, the Standard Model of elementary particle interactions predicts that the and bosons would be massless, when, in reality, they are observed to have mass. To overcome this, spontaneous symmetry breaking is augmented by the Higgs mechanism to give these particles mass. It also suggests the presence of a new particle, the Higgs boson, which was detected in 2012 and confirmed in 2013.
The and bosons are the elementary particles that mediate the weak interaction, while the photon mediates the electromagnetic interaction. At energies much greater than all these particles behave in a similar manner. The Weinberg-Salam theory predicts that, at lower energies, this symmetry is broken so that the photon and the massive and bosons emerge. In addition, fermions develop mass consistently.
The Higgs mechanism is the spontaneous symmetry breaking of gauge symmetries. it is an important component in understanding the superconductivity of metals and the origin of particle masses in the standard model of particle physics. The strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces can all be understood as arising from gauge symmetries. Spontaneous breaking of a gauge symmetry does not give rise to characteristic massless Nambu-Goldstone physical modes, but only massive modes, like the plasma mode in a superconductor, or the Higgs mode observed in particle physics. In the standard model of particle physics, spontaneous symmetry breaking of the gauge symmetry associated with the electro-weak force generates masses for several particles, and separates the electromagnetic and weak forces. Superconductivity of metals is a condensed-matter analog of the Higgs phenomena, in which a condensate of Cooper pairs of electrons spontaneously breaks the gauge symmetry associated with light and electromagnetism.
In the Duality of Time Theory, as we have seen in section I.4.5, the physical vacuum, which is the dynamic aether, is the extreme state which may be achieved when the apparent velocity, or momentum, becomes absolutely zero, both as the object s total velocity and any vector velocities of its constituents, and this corresponds to absolute zero temperature (). This dynamic vacuum state is therefore a super fluid, which is a perfect Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), since it consists of indistinguishable geometrical points that all share the same state. In Quantum Field Theory, complex-scalar fields are employed to describe superconductivity and super fluidity. The Higgs field itself is complex-scalar, and it is the only fundamental scalar quantum field that has been observed in nature, but there are other effective field theories that describe various physical phenomena. Indeed, some cosmological models have already suggested that vacuum could be a kind of yet-unknown super fluid, which would explain all the four fundamental interactions and provide mass generation mechanism that replaces or alters the Higgs mechanism that only partially solves the problem of mass. In BEC models, masses of elementary particles can arise as a result of interaction with the super fluid vacuum, similarly to the gap generation mechanism in superconductors, in addition to other anticipated exotic properties that could explain many problems in the current models, including dark matter and dark energy. Therefore, the new complex-time geometry is the natural complex-scalar quantum field that explains the dynamic generation of space, mass and energy, as we shall discuss further in section III.3.3.
Actually, according to this genuinely-complex time-time geometry, there can be four absolute or super states: super mass , super fluid , super gas , and super energy , which can be compared with the classical four elements: Earth, Water, Air, and Fire, respectively. These four extreme or elemental states, which the ancient Sumerians employed in their cosmology to explain the complexity of Nature, are formed dynamically, in the inner levels of time, by the Single Monad that is their quint-essence . We will see, in section III.3.2 below, that this new concept of aether and quintessence is essential for understanding dark matter and energy, and solving the cosmological constant discrepancy.
Moreover, the super fluid and super gas states, and , are in orthogonal time directions, so if describes matter that is kinetically evolving in the normal level of time with velocity, would similarly describe anti-matter in the orthogonal direction. This could at once solve the problems of super symmetry and matter-antimatter asymmetry, because fermions in one time direction are bosons in the orthogonal dimension, and vice versa, and of course these two dimensions do not naturally interact because they are mutually orthogonal. This could also provide some handy tests to verify the Duality of Time Theory, but this requires prolonged discussion beyond the scope of this article, as outlined in other literature. Super symmetry and its breaking will be also discussed further in section II.3.1.