A brief history of the physical theory of the great unification
Lawrence Kraus is a theoretical physicist, cosmologist, director of the Origins project, and founder of the Earth and Space Exploration School at Arizona State University. He is the author of such best-selling books as Universe from Nothing [A Universe from Nothing] and Star Trek Physics [The Physics of Star Trek]. Translation of an excerpt from his future book, The Greatest Story Told So far: Why Are We Here? [The Greatest Story Ever Told — So Far: Why Are We Here?].
Specialists in particle physics before the discovery of the Higgs particle in 2012 dreamed of two types of nightmares. The first is that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will not find anything. In this case, it would be the last major accelerator built to probe the fundamental structure of the universe. The second is that the Higgs particle predicted by theoretical physicist Peter Higgs in 1964 will be found at the LHC ... and nothing more.
')
Each discovery of one level of reality shows us the following levels. Therefore, each important discovery in science usually leaves us with more questions than answers. But on the other hand, it usually gives us at least an outline of a further path, helping us to find answers to new questions. The successful discovery of the Higgs particle and the confirmation of the existence in space of an invisible background of the Higgs field (in the quantum world, each particle, such as the Higgs particle, is associated with the field), was a powerful confirmation of the bold scientific discoveries of the 20th century.
But the words of Sheldon Lee Glashow have not lost their relevance: the Higgs particle is similar to the sewer. She hides all the untidy details that we don’t want to talk about. The Higgs field interacts with most elementary particles as they move through space, and creates a resistance force that slows their movement and gives them the appearance of mass. Therefore, the masses of elementary particles, measured by us, and making possible our familiar world, are something like an illusion, an accident of our perception.
This idea may look elegant, but in reality it represents a special addition to the Standard Model of Physics - explaining three of the four known forces, and how they interact with matter. It was added to the theory in order to satisfy the requirements for an accurate description of our world. But the theory itself does not require it. The universe could easily exist with massless particles and long-range weak interactions (one of the four interactions — the rest will be strong, electromagnetic, and gravitational force). Just there would not be us and our questions. Moreover, the exact physics of the Higgs model is not defined within the Standard Model alone. A particle could be 20 times heavier or 100 times lighter.
So why does it even exist? And why is she so heavy? (Considering that when a scientist asks the question “Why?”, In fact he means “How?”) If there were no Higgs particles, there would not be such a world as we observe - but this is clearly not possible an explanation. Or can it? To understand the basis of Higgs physics is to understand how we appeared. When we ask: “Why are we here?”, In essence, we ask: “Why is the Higgs here?” And the Standard Model cannot answer this question.
There are some hints derived from a combination of theory and experiment. Shortly after the Standard Model’s clear structure was established, in 1974, and long before experimentally confirming its details in the next decade, two different groups of Harvard physicists, in which both Sheldon Lee Glashow and Steven Weinberg worked, noticed something interesting. Glashow, together with Howard Georgie , did what he could best: he looked for patterns in existing particles and interactions, and new possibilities with the help of the mathematical theory of groups.
In the Standard Model, weak and electromagnetic interactions are combined at high energies into a single force, which physicists call "electro-weak." This means that the same mathematics controls the weak and electromagnetic interaction, they both obey the same symmetries, and these two forces are different reflections of the same unified theory. But symmetry is “spontaneously broken” by the Higgs field interacting with particles that carry weak interaction, but not with particles that transfer electromagnetic. This property of nature leads to the fact that these two interactions look separate and differ on the scales available to our measurements - while the weak interaction works at short distances, and the electromagnetic interaction - at long distances.
Georgie and Glashow attempted to expand this idea and connect strong interactions to them, and found that all known particles and three non-gravitational interactions fit naturally in one fundamentally symmetric structure. They reasoned that this symmetry can spontaneously collapse on some ultra-high energy scale (and at a short distance), which lies beyond the limits of the possibilities of modern experiments, and generate two separate symmetries - strong and electro-weak interaction. As a result, at lower energies and at large distances electroweak symmetry is destroyed, dividing the electroweak interaction into weak, acting at short distances, and electromagnetic, acting at long distances.
Such a theory they modestly called the theory of the great unification (TVO).
Around the same time, Weinberg and Georgie, along with Helen Quinn, noticed something interesting in developing the work of Frank Wilcheck, David Gross and David Politzer. If at short distances the strong interaction becomes weaker, then the electromagnetic and weak ones become stronger.
It was not necessary to be a rocket scientist in order to be interested in whether the strength of three different interactions on some small scale does not coincide. After calculating, they found (with the accuracy with which interactions were measured) that such a combination is possible, but only at distances of 15 orders of magnitude smaller than the size of the proton.
If TVO was the one proposed by Howard Georgie and Glashow - then it was good news, because if all the particles we observe in nature combine in this way, then there must be new particles ( gauge bosons ) providing the connection between the quarks (of which the protons and neutrons) and electrons with neutrinos. This would mean that protons can decay into lighter particles, which we can observe in principle. As Glashow wrote, "diamonds are not forever."
And even then it was known that the lifetime of protons is extremely long. Not only because we still exist 14 billion years after the Big Bang, but also because we don’t die of cancer in childhood. If the average proton lifetime was less than a billion billion years, then in childhood enough protons would decay in our body so that their radiation would kill us. In quantum mechanics, all processes are probabilistic. If the average proton lives a billion billion years, and if you have a billion billion protons, then one of them will decay on average every year. And in our body is much more than a billion billion protons.
However, with such an incredibly small scale of distances, and, therefore, with such a huge mass scale associated with spontaneous symmetry breaking in TVO, the new gauge bosons receive huge masses. And this would lead to the fact that the interactions controlled by them would occur at such small distances that they would be incredibly weak in terms of protons and neutrons. As a result, although the protons can decay, in our case, before that, they can live, perhaps a million billion billion billion years.
Thanks to the results obtained by Glashow with Georgie, as well as Georgie with Quinn and Weinberg, the expectations of the great synthesis were in the air. After the success of the electroweak theory of physics, studying particles, were ambitious and believed in the subsequent unification.
How do you know if these ideas are true? It was impossible to build an accelerator capable of working on energies a million billion times more than the rest mass of protons. The circumference of such a machine would have to be compared with the orbit of the moon. And even if this were possible, as a result of the fiasco of the Superconducting supercollider, no government would approve such an estimate. [This collider, also called the Desertron, was to be built in Texas in the 1990s, but due to budget problems. was cancelled. It was planned that the length of its circumference will be 87.1 km. $ 2 billion was spent on construction, and the final cost was estimated at $ 12 billion - approx. trans.].
Fortunately, there was another way - to use the probability described by me, which limits the proton lifetime. If TVO predicts a proton lifetime of one thousand billion billion billion years, then you have to push a thousand billion billion billion protons into one detector, and then on average one of them will decay each year.
And where do you get so many protons? It's simple: in 3000 tons of water.
All that was required for this was to place a tank of water in the dark, make sure that there was no radioactive background in this place, surround it with sensitive photocells able to detect flashes of light in the detector, and then wait a year waiting for a flash of light when a proton decays. It sounds scary, but at least two large experimental installations were paid for and built according to this scheme - one deep underground in the salt mine near Lake Erie (IMB), the other in the Kamioka zinc mine in Japan (Kamiokanda). The mines were used to cut off cosmic rays, against which it would have been impossible to notice the proton decay.
The Large Hadron Collider
Both experiments began to work in 1982-1983. Scientists were so enthusiastic about TVO that they were confidently waiting for the signal to appear soon. In this case, the SCR would be the culmination of a decade of tremendous development and discoveries in particle physics - not to mention the next Nobel Prize for Glashow , and possibly some more.
Unfortunately, in this case, nature was not so good. Not a single signal appeared in either the first year, or the second, or the third. The simplest and elegant model of Glashow and Georgie soon had to be rejected. But the fever TVO has already captured scientists, and it was difficult to get rid of it. Other proposals were made about theories of unification, because of which the decay of protons would go beyond the scope of current experiments.
On February 23, 1987, another event happened that again demonstrated an almost universal aphorism: every new window into the Universe takes us by surprise. On that day, a group of astronomers on photographic plates accumulated overnight discovered the nearest exploded star (supernova) of all that we have seen in the last 400 years. This star, which was 160,000 light-years away, was in the Large Magellanic Cloud , a small galaxy, a satellite of the Milky Way, which can be seen in the southern hemisphere.
If our theories about exploding stars are correct, most of the energy they emit should take the form of neutrinos, despite the fact that the light of their explosion is the brightest of cosmic fireworks (and they explode about one star in a single galaxy in 100 years). Rough calculations showed that the IMB and Kamiokande water detectors should have detected about 20 collisions with neutrinos. And when the experimenters of these detectors studied the data of that day, 8 candidates were found at IBM on a 10-second interval, and on Kamiokand - 11. For neutrino physics, this was just a sea of ​​data. Neutrino astrophysics has suddenly matured. Probably 1900 scientific works of various physicists (including me) were based on these 19 events. They realized that this event opened an unprecedented window into the nuclei of exploding stars, and into the laboratory not only for astrophysics, but also for neutrino physics.
Driven by the idea that large proton decay detectors could simultaneously become astrophysical neutrino detectors, several groups of scientists began to build a new generation of such dual-use detectors. The largest was re-built in the Kamioka mine and dubbed Super-Kamiokande - and for good reason. This giant reservoir of water weighing 50,000 tons, surrounded by 11,800 photocells, worked in an operating mine, and the experiment was conducted with laboratory cleanliness. It was necessary, because with such a huge detector it was necessary to take care not only of external cosmic rays, but also of internal radioactive contaminations, which would eclipse all useful signals.
At this time, interest in astrophysical neutrinos was also at its peak. The sun emits neutrinos as a result of nuclear reactions in its core, and for 20 years the physicist Ray Davis discovered solar neutrinos, but the events happened three times less often than the best models of the Sun predicted. A new type of solar neutrino detector, called the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), was built in the mine town of Sudbury in Canada.
To date, the Super-Kamiokande has almost continuously worked, sometimes undergoing various improvements, for 20 years. No signals from proton decay and no new supernovae have been observed since. However, accurate neutrino observations, coupled with additional observations at SNO, unequivocally confirmed the reality of the solar neutrino deficit, discovered by Ray Davis. It was found that the deficit exists not because of astrophysical phenomena occurring in the Sun, but because of the properties of the neutrino. It became clear that at least one of the three types of neutrinos is not massless. Since the Standard Model of the neutrino mass is not included, it was the first confirmed observation that some new physics is operating in nature outside the Standard Model and the Higgs.
High-energy neutrinos regularly bombard the Earth after protons from high-energy cosmic rays collide with the atmosphere and produce a wide air shower from secondary subatomic particles, where these neutrinos are also encountered. Observations on them showed that the second type of neutrino has a mass. It is slightly larger than the first, but much smaller than the electron mass. For this observation, teams from SNO and Kamiokande received the Nobel Prize in 2015 - a week before I started writing this book. To this day, these seductive hints of new physics have not been explained with the help of our theories.
The lack of proton decay was a disappointment, but not a complete surprise. From the moment when TVO was first proposed, the landscape of physics has changed. More accurate measurements of the values ​​of three non-gravitational interactions, together with more complex calculations of changing their magnitude with distance, showed that if only particles from the Standard Model exist in nature, then the forces of these three interactions will not unite on the same scale. In order for the Great Unification to occur, there will have to be a new physics on an energy scale that surpasses everything that we have seen so far. And the presence of new particles would not only change the energy scale for combining the three interactions, but also increase the scale for TVO, thereby reducing the rate of proton decay - and increasing their lifetime beyond billions of billions of billions of years.
The Large Hadron Collider
In parallel with these events, theorists actively used new mathematical tools to study a new probable type of symmetry, which they began to call supersymmetry. This fundamental symmetry differs from other previously known ones in that it connects two different types of particles — fermions (particles with a half-integer spin) and bosons (particles with a whole spin). And the point is that if such symmetry is observed in nature, then for every particle known in the Standard Model there must be at least one new particle. For each new boson, a fermion must exist. For each fermion is a boson.
Since we do not observe these particles, this symmetry cannot manifest itself at the level of the universe accessible to us and, therefore, must be broken - and this means that new particles must have masses large enough for them not to be found in existing accelerators.
What is so attractive about symmetry, which suddenly doubles the number of particles in nature, when there is no evidence of their existence? For the most part, she seduces with Great Unification. Since if TVO exists on the scale of masses by 15–16 orders of magnitude of the large rest mass of the proton, then it is 13 orders of magnitude larger than the scales on which electroweak symmetry is broken. The question is how and why in the fundamental laws of nature there is such a huge scale gap. In particular, if the Higgs is really the last particle of the Standard Model, then the question arises: why is the energy scale of the Higgs symmetry breaking by 13 orders less than the scale of breaking the symmetry of some new field that breaks the TVO symmetry into separate interactions?
And the problem is even worse than it seems. ( , ), (, ), , , . .. . , , , , , .
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, – – , .
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, . , . , 30- , , , , , , .
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, , . . , , . , , . , , -.
. 1984 , 1960- . , , . , , , . – , .
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, , -, 30 . , - , , : , , , , , . , - , , .
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Specialists in particle physics before the discovery of the Higgs particle in 2012 dreamed of two types of nightmares. The first is that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will not find anything. In this case, it would be the last major accelerator built to probe the fundamental structure of the universe. The second is that the Higgs particle predicted by theoretical physicist Peter Higgs in 1964 will be found at the LHC ... and nothing more.
')
Each discovery of one level of reality shows us the following levels. Therefore, each important discovery in science usually leaves us with more questions than answers. But on the other hand, it usually gives us at least an outline of a further path, helping us to find answers to new questions. The successful discovery of the Higgs particle and the confirmation of the existence in space of an invisible background of the Higgs field (in the quantum world, each particle, such as the Higgs particle, is associated with the field), was a powerful confirmation of the bold scientific discoveries of the 20th century.
But the words of Sheldon Lee Glashow have not lost their relevance: the Higgs particle is similar to the sewer. She hides all the untidy details that we don’t want to talk about. The Higgs field interacts with most elementary particles as they move through space, and creates a resistance force that slows their movement and gives them the appearance of mass. Therefore, the masses of elementary particles, measured by us, and making possible our familiar world, are something like an illusion, an accident of our perception.
This idea may look elegant, but in reality it represents a special addition to the Standard Model of Physics - explaining three of the four known forces, and how they interact with matter. It was added to the theory in order to satisfy the requirements for an accurate description of our world. But the theory itself does not require it. The universe could easily exist with massless particles and long-range weak interactions (one of the four interactions — the rest will be strong, electromagnetic, and gravitational force). Just there would not be us and our questions. Moreover, the exact physics of the Higgs model is not defined within the Standard Model alone. A particle could be 20 times heavier or 100 times lighter.
So why does it even exist? And why is she so heavy? (Considering that when a scientist asks the question “Why?”, In fact he means “How?”) If there were no Higgs particles, there would not be such a world as we observe - but this is clearly not possible an explanation. Or can it? To understand the basis of Higgs physics is to understand how we appeared. When we ask: “Why are we here?”, In essence, we ask: “Why is the Higgs here?” And the Standard Model cannot answer this question.
There are some hints derived from a combination of theory and experiment. Shortly after the Standard Model’s clear structure was established, in 1974, and long before experimentally confirming its details in the next decade, two different groups of Harvard physicists, in which both Sheldon Lee Glashow and Steven Weinberg worked, noticed something interesting. Glashow, together with Howard Georgie , did what he could best: he looked for patterns in existing particles and interactions, and new possibilities with the help of the mathematical theory of groups.
In the Standard Model, weak and electromagnetic interactions are combined at high energies into a single force, which physicists call "electro-weak." This means that the same mathematics controls the weak and electromagnetic interaction, they both obey the same symmetries, and these two forces are different reflections of the same unified theory. But symmetry is “spontaneously broken” by the Higgs field interacting with particles that carry weak interaction, but not with particles that transfer electromagnetic. This property of nature leads to the fact that these two interactions look separate and differ on the scales available to our measurements - while the weak interaction works at short distances, and the electromagnetic interaction - at long distances.
Georgie and Glashow attempted to expand this idea and connect strong interactions to them, and found that all known particles and three non-gravitational interactions fit naturally in one fundamentally symmetric structure. They reasoned that this symmetry can spontaneously collapse on some ultra-high energy scale (and at a short distance), which lies beyond the limits of the possibilities of modern experiments, and generate two separate symmetries - strong and electro-weak interaction. As a result, at lower energies and at large distances electroweak symmetry is destroyed, dividing the electroweak interaction into weak, acting at short distances, and electromagnetic, acting at long distances.
Such a theory they modestly called the theory of the great unification (TVO).
Around the same time, Weinberg and Georgie, along with Helen Quinn, noticed something interesting in developing the work of Frank Wilcheck, David Gross and David Politzer. If at short distances the strong interaction becomes weaker, then the electromagnetic and weak ones become stronger.
It was not necessary to be a rocket scientist in order to be interested in whether the strength of three different interactions on some small scale does not coincide. After calculating, they found (with the accuracy with which interactions were measured) that such a combination is possible, but only at distances of 15 orders of magnitude smaller than the size of the proton.
If TVO was the one proposed by Howard Georgie and Glashow - then it was good news, because if all the particles we observe in nature combine in this way, then there must be new particles ( gauge bosons ) providing the connection between the quarks (of which the protons and neutrons) and electrons with neutrinos. This would mean that protons can decay into lighter particles, which we can observe in principle. As Glashow wrote, "diamonds are not forever."
And even then it was known that the lifetime of protons is extremely long. Not only because we still exist 14 billion years after the Big Bang, but also because we don’t die of cancer in childhood. If the average proton lifetime was less than a billion billion years, then in childhood enough protons would decay in our body so that their radiation would kill us. In quantum mechanics, all processes are probabilistic. If the average proton lives a billion billion years, and if you have a billion billion protons, then one of them will decay on average every year. And in our body is much more than a billion billion protons.
However, with such an incredibly small scale of distances, and, therefore, with such a huge mass scale associated with spontaneous symmetry breaking in TVO, the new gauge bosons receive huge masses. And this would lead to the fact that the interactions controlled by them would occur at such small distances that they would be incredibly weak in terms of protons and neutrons. As a result, although the protons can decay, in our case, before that, they can live, perhaps a million billion billion billion years.
Thanks to the results obtained by Glashow with Georgie, as well as Georgie with Quinn and Weinberg, the expectations of the great synthesis were in the air. After the success of the electroweak theory of physics, studying particles, were ambitious and believed in the subsequent unification.
How do you know if these ideas are true? It was impossible to build an accelerator capable of working on energies a million billion times more than the rest mass of protons. The circumference of such a machine would have to be compared with the orbit of the moon. And even if this were possible, as a result of the fiasco of the Superconducting supercollider, no government would approve such an estimate. [This collider, also called the Desertron, was to be built in Texas in the 1990s, but due to budget problems. was cancelled. It was planned that the length of its circumference will be 87.1 km. $ 2 billion was spent on construction, and the final cost was estimated at $ 12 billion - approx. trans.].
Fortunately, there was another way - to use the probability described by me, which limits the proton lifetime. If TVO predicts a proton lifetime of one thousand billion billion billion years, then you have to push a thousand billion billion billion protons into one detector, and then on average one of them will decay each year.
And where do you get so many protons? It's simple: in 3000 tons of water.
All that was required for this was to place a tank of water in the dark, make sure that there was no radioactive background in this place, surround it with sensitive photocells able to detect flashes of light in the detector, and then wait a year waiting for a flash of light when a proton decays. It sounds scary, but at least two large experimental installations were paid for and built according to this scheme - one deep underground in the salt mine near Lake Erie (IMB), the other in the Kamioka zinc mine in Japan (Kamiokanda). The mines were used to cut off cosmic rays, against which it would have been impossible to notice the proton decay.
The Large Hadron Collider
Both experiments began to work in 1982-1983. Scientists were so enthusiastic about TVO that they were confidently waiting for the signal to appear soon. In this case, the SCR would be the culmination of a decade of tremendous development and discoveries in particle physics - not to mention the next Nobel Prize for Glashow , and possibly some more.
Unfortunately, in this case, nature was not so good. Not a single signal appeared in either the first year, or the second, or the third. The simplest and elegant model of Glashow and Georgie soon had to be rejected. But the fever TVO has already captured scientists, and it was difficult to get rid of it. Other proposals were made about theories of unification, because of which the decay of protons would go beyond the scope of current experiments.
On February 23, 1987, another event happened that again demonstrated an almost universal aphorism: every new window into the Universe takes us by surprise. On that day, a group of astronomers on photographic plates accumulated overnight discovered the nearest exploded star (supernova) of all that we have seen in the last 400 years. This star, which was 160,000 light-years away, was in the Large Magellanic Cloud , a small galaxy, a satellite of the Milky Way, which can be seen in the southern hemisphere.
If our theories about exploding stars are correct, most of the energy they emit should take the form of neutrinos, despite the fact that the light of their explosion is the brightest of cosmic fireworks (and they explode about one star in a single galaxy in 100 years). Rough calculations showed that the IMB and Kamiokande water detectors should have detected about 20 collisions with neutrinos. And when the experimenters of these detectors studied the data of that day, 8 candidates were found at IBM on a 10-second interval, and on Kamiokand - 11. For neutrino physics, this was just a sea of ​​data. Neutrino astrophysics has suddenly matured. Probably 1900 scientific works of various physicists (including me) were based on these 19 events. They realized that this event opened an unprecedented window into the nuclei of exploding stars, and into the laboratory not only for astrophysics, but also for neutrino physics.
Driven by the idea that large proton decay detectors could simultaneously become astrophysical neutrino detectors, several groups of scientists began to build a new generation of such dual-use detectors. The largest was re-built in the Kamioka mine and dubbed Super-Kamiokande - and for good reason. This giant reservoir of water weighing 50,000 tons, surrounded by 11,800 photocells, worked in an operating mine, and the experiment was conducted with laboratory cleanliness. It was necessary, because with such a huge detector it was necessary to take care not only of external cosmic rays, but also of internal radioactive contaminations, which would eclipse all useful signals.
At this time, interest in astrophysical neutrinos was also at its peak. The sun emits neutrinos as a result of nuclear reactions in its core, and for 20 years the physicist Ray Davis discovered solar neutrinos, but the events happened three times less often than the best models of the Sun predicted. A new type of solar neutrino detector, called the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), was built in the mine town of Sudbury in Canada.
To date, the Super-Kamiokande has almost continuously worked, sometimes undergoing various improvements, for 20 years. No signals from proton decay and no new supernovae have been observed since. However, accurate neutrino observations, coupled with additional observations at SNO, unequivocally confirmed the reality of the solar neutrino deficit, discovered by Ray Davis. It was found that the deficit exists not because of astrophysical phenomena occurring in the Sun, but because of the properties of the neutrino. It became clear that at least one of the three types of neutrinos is not massless. Since the Standard Model of the neutrino mass is not included, it was the first confirmed observation that some new physics is operating in nature outside the Standard Model and the Higgs.
High-energy neutrinos regularly bombard the Earth after protons from high-energy cosmic rays collide with the atmosphere and produce a wide air shower from secondary subatomic particles, where these neutrinos are also encountered. Observations on them showed that the second type of neutrino has a mass. It is slightly larger than the first, but much smaller than the electron mass. For this observation, teams from SNO and Kamiokande received the Nobel Prize in 2015 - a week before I started writing this book. To this day, these seductive hints of new physics have not been explained with the help of our theories.
The lack of proton decay was a disappointment, but not a complete surprise. From the moment when TVO was first proposed, the landscape of physics has changed. More accurate measurements of the values ​​of three non-gravitational interactions, together with more complex calculations of changing their magnitude with distance, showed that if only particles from the Standard Model exist in nature, then the forces of these three interactions will not unite on the same scale. In order for the Great Unification to occur, there will have to be a new physics on an energy scale that surpasses everything that we have seen so far. And the presence of new particles would not only change the energy scale for combining the three interactions, but also increase the scale for TVO, thereby reducing the rate of proton decay - and increasing their lifetime beyond billions of billions of billions of years.
The Large Hadron Collider
In parallel with these events, theorists actively used new mathematical tools to study a new probable type of symmetry, which they began to call supersymmetry. This fundamental symmetry differs from other previously known ones in that it connects two different types of particles — fermions (particles with a half-integer spin) and bosons (particles with a whole spin). And the point is that if such symmetry is observed in nature, then for every particle known in the Standard Model there must be at least one new particle. For each new boson, a fermion must exist. For each fermion is a boson.
Since we do not observe these particles, this symmetry cannot manifest itself at the level of the universe accessible to us and, therefore, must be broken - and this means that new particles must have masses large enough for them not to be found in existing accelerators.
What is so attractive about symmetry, which suddenly doubles the number of particles in nature, when there is no evidence of their existence? For the most part, she seduces with Great Unification. Since if TVO exists on the scale of masses by 15–16 orders of magnitude of the large rest mass of the proton, then it is 13 orders of magnitude larger than the scales on which electroweak symmetry is broken. The question is how and why in the fundamental laws of nature there is such a huge scale gap. In particular, if the Higgs is really the last particle of the Standard Model, then the question arises: why is the energy scale of the Higgs symmetry breaking by 13 orders less than the scale of breaking the symmetry of some new field that breaks the TVO symmetry into separate interactions?
And the problem is even worse than it seems. ( , ), (, ), , , . .. . , , , , , .
1981 , . , . , , , , . , , , .
( , , , ), . , , . , .
, – – , .
, , . «» , .
, , . , . « » . , , , . !
. , , , . , , , . , , . , , , .
. , , . , , , – . , , , – , .
, . 135 , . , , .
-. , , 125 . , .
. , , , , . . . . , , . , , , , .
, , . , .
. – , , , . , , . , , , , , , . , . ?
, . , . , 30- , , , , , , .
, , , . , , , , , , . . .
, . . - , , . , – . , , - , .
, , . . , , . , , . , , -.
. 1984 , 1960- . , , . , , , . – , .
-, . , , . , , , .
, , -, 30 . , - , , : , , , , , . , - , , .
, , . . , , , , .
. , ? , ? , , .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/403521/
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