Isotopic spin and the Higgs mechanism are two
major features of the Standard Model that I’ve written about on this blog, but
I just realized that for some unknown reason I’ve never pointed out that these
two phenomena are closely related. One could almost say that they’re the same
phenomenon. Mainstream physicists have no idea that this is the case. I’ll
correct this oversight in this post.
e here that spacetime consists of
points, some of which are bosonic and some fermionic. I told you here about inflation, the
super-rapid expansion of spacetime that ends with the universe oscillating with
energy, some of which is absorbed by points to form particles, which are
excited spacetime points as explained here. The next step was to show here that some of the fermionic
points move between time ticks while others are stationary. We finally got to
the Higgs field here, where we saw that the ratio
of stationary points to moving points is revealed by the vacuum expectation
value of the Higgs field. The Higgs field has a potential energy that’s
proportional to its vacuum expectation value. It evolves towards the minimum of
its potential, which happens to be zero, but quantum effects keep it from
getting there, so the ratio of stationary fermionic points to moving fermionic
points settles at a constant value of about 10-17. This ratio
applies only to points, not to particles.
An excited stationary point is an electron. An
excited moving point is a neutrino. A moving electron is a quantum
superposition of the two. The Standard Model identifies the electron and the
neutrino as the same particle with different values of an intrinsic symmetry
called weak isotopic spin, or weak isospin. Reactions that change
these particles into each other are considered examples of the weak interaction and are said to be
mediated by virtual particles called W and Z bosons.
The Higgs field maintains its vacuum
expectation value by changing moving points to stationary points and vice
versa. This goes on all the time. If some of the changing points happen to host
particles, we see weak interactions involving W and Z bosons. So you see, weak
interactions are just the particle manifestation of the Higgs field doing its
thing.
