Mathematics Colloquium

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On the Higgs mechanism for mass generation

Speaker: Sourav Chatterjee, Stanford

Location: Warren Weaver Hall 1302

Date: Monday, March 25, 2024, 3:45 p.m.

Synopsis:

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.