Sourav Chatterjee – Stanford University
Wednesday, December 13th, 10:45AM EST (Zoom meeting starts at 10:30 EDT)
On the Higgs mechanism for mass generation
I will talk about the Higgs mechanism for mass generation and some recent progress on this topic. No background is necessary. I will start by introducing lattice gauge theories coupled to Higgs fields. After a survey of existing results, I will discuss what is needed to prove rigorously that the Higgs mechanism can indeed generate mass in the continuum limit of these theories. Finally, I will present a result which shows that in a certain scaling limit in any dimension three or higher, SU(2) Yang-Mills-Higgs theory converges to a continuum limit object which has an explicit description as a scale-invariant random distribution. This allows an exact computation of the mass generated by the Higgs mechanism in the continuum limit of this theory.