Re: Why the particles become massless? or why Higgs field value becomes zero?

Mike,

You wrote quoting from Matt Strassler's wonderful webpage
 http://goo.gl/uRGarY

that, "If Higgs field has zero value, all the particles become
massless except Higgs particles themselves."  That is correct.  The
massive gauge bosons W+, W-, and Z acquire their masses through the
Higgs mechanism
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_mechanism

and the quarks and leptons get their masses from a Yukawa coupling to
the Higgs field.  The Higgs particle gets some, but not all, of its
mass from coupling to the Higgs field so that if the Higgs field were
set to zero the Higgs particle would still be massive.  So far, so
good.

But then in points 1) and 2) there are several statements and
assumptions which will depend on exactly how close to the Big Bang you
want to explore.

Matt Strassler writes on another webpage, "However, the Higgs field
has been non-zero ever since the current universe-as-we-know-it has
been cooler than a few million billion degrees... since a tiny
fraction of a second after the current Big Bang is naively thought to
have begun."  ( http://goo.gl/4dwsEF )

Any time after the first picosecond, in the high temperature
environment of the early Universe, the particle energies would be much
greater than their rest mass energies, so the massive particles behave
as if they were almost massless.  This is merely an approximation; the
massive particles still have their masses and the Higgs field still has
its nonzero value.
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe

Before this time, Matt Strassler says, "It is quite possible that
there was an extremely short time when the universe was very hot and
the Higgs field's value was close to zero; it is even possible there
was an extremely short time when all of the fields we know about were
rearranged beyond recognition" ( http://goo.gl/4dwsEF )

Bear in mind, there is no evidence for this latter point and so it
remains speculation.


--Randall J. Scalise
 http://www.physics.smu.edu/scalise