📝 SummarXiv

Abstract

A new interpretation of the Brout-Englert-Higgs (BEH) mechanism is proposed. The quantum vacuum before symmetry is broken is not a quiet state, but a relativistic many-body state of massless fermion and antifermion that appear and disappear rapidly. In order for their many-body state to be interpretable, they should move along a common direction of time from past to future. This a priori kinematical condition restricts possible states to explicitly CP invariant state, leading to another lowest-energy state instead of the Fock vacuum. In this vacuum, whatever effective interaction acts on massless fermion, it comes back on fermion and antifermion as an inertial mass. In this physical vacuum, massless fermion and antifermion are generated as pairs, and they behave as quasi bosons. Due to Bose statistics, their direction of motion is made parallel to each other, and their transverse excitations are suppressed by an energy gap, which makes the gauge boson massive, and explains the origin of the vacuum condensate in the BEH mechanism. The dynamic part of the above effective interaction induces a Higgs-like excitation. This interpretation sheds a new light on the BEH mechanism.