- #71
mitchell porter
Gold Member
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There was a thread ten years ago about what Susskind meant by the "ziggs". I also discussed some of these topics with @nnunn last year. Important points:
The Higgs condensate has four different scalar excitations. Three of these correspond to the spin-0 components of W+,W-,Z bosons, and the fourth is the Higgs boson. Susskind's ziggs is either one of the first three, or the scalar in a simpler toy world where there's only a U(1) charge and no SU(2), I forget which.
There are no "quanta of weak hypercharge" per se in the standard model, no more than there are "quanta of spin", or (@nnunn didn't say this one but it would be analogous) "quanta of energy". The quanta are all particles for which weak hypercharge, spin, energy are properties that they possess. Thanks to laws of conservation, a particle in an interaction may in effect as a carrier of these properties that transfers them, that's all.
Now, it is true that in condensed matter physics, one sometimes hears of quasiparticles with names like "spinon". These seem to involve entangling elementary particles like electrons, then factorizing or disentangling these entanglements, in a way which clusters spin degrees of freedom separately from (e.g.) charge degrees of freedom. It's logically possible that the fundamental particles can be refactored in such a way, so as to produce a theory or an ontology in which there really are "quanta of weak hypercharge" and so on. But I don't know a concrete example of such a theory.
The Higgs condensate has four different scalar excitations. Three of these correspond to the spin-0 components of W+,W-,Z bosons, and the fourth is the Higgs boson. Susskind's ziggs is either one of the first three, or the scalar in a simpler toy world where there's only a U(1) charge and no SU(2), I forget which.
There are no "quanta of weak hypercharge" per se in the standard model, no more than there are "quanta of spin", or (@nnunn didn't say this one but it would be analogous) "quanta of energy". The quanta are all particles for which weak hypercharge, spin, energy are properties that they possess. Thanks to laws of conservation, a particle in an interaction may in effect as a carrier of these properties that transfers them, that's all.
Now, it is true that in condensed matter physics, one sometimes hears of quasiparticles with names like "spinon". These seem to involve entangling elementary particles like electrons, then factorizing or disentangling these entanglements, in a way which clusters spin degrees of freedom separately from (e.g.) charge degrees of freedom. It's logically possible that the fundamental particles can be refactored in such a way, so as to produce a theory or an ontology in which there really are "quanta of weak hypercharge" and so on. But I don't know a concrete example of such a theory.