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I have read this question:

ElectroWeak symmetry breaking and the early universe

Actually, the Higgs has no vev at sufficiently high energies. This is a phoneomenon called symmetry restoration: the Higgs potential receives corrections from the thermal bath, leading to the so-called finite temperature effective potential.

Now as I understand, all elementary particles are massless at the beginning of the universe, and after symmetry breaking, some particles gain rest mass through the Higgs mechanism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe#Electroweak_symmetry_breaking

In the Standard Model of particle physics, electroweak symmetry breaking happens at a temperature of 159.5±1.5 GeV.[21] When this happens, it breaks electroweak gauge symmetry.

Are there massless bosons at scales above electroweak scale?

Can symmetry be restored in high energy scattering?

Restoration of spontaneously broken symmetry at high energy

I am not asking about the symmetry being restored, I am just asking about the particles being massless above the energy threshold.

Now does this mean that if we could create collisions at sufficiently high energies (above 160GeV), the result would only be massless particles?

Do particles gain mass only at energy levels found during the big bang?

So, regardless of the energies and temperatures, if the Higgs field has a non-zero VEV, gauge and matter fields appear massive "inside" the electroweak superconductor. This is analogous to how photons appear massive inside an electromagnetic superconductor. Of course, if the average energy are very high, the gauge and matter fields are effectively massless; the kinetic energies dwarf the mass-energies.

If it is the Higgs field that has a VeV that changes so that at high energies the local (global) minimum disappears, then should it not mean that all particles are massless? Is it just the gauge bosons or is it all elementary particles?

Question:

  1. Are only gauge bosons massless or all elementary particles (above the energy of symmetry breaking)?
Árpád Szendrei
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  • The answer to the question you already link and I marked just as duplicate already explains the difference between "increasing energy" in a collider experiment where masses become irrelevant but don't vanish and a true phase transition due to overall temperature/energy where the masses do vanish. It is not clear what exactly you want to know in this question beyond that. – ACuriousMind Apr 25 '20 at 16:50
  • @ACuriousMind I believe my question is not answered, as my question is, if the Higgs mechanism is responsible for this (and the VeV minima as a function of energy), then my question is, are these gauge bosons only massless or all elementary particles above these energies? So my question is whether just gauge bosons are massless above these energies (because of the symmetry) or all elementary particles. Can you please reopen as my question is not answered. – Árpád Szendrei Apr 25 '20 at 18:39

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