2

I recently heard that electrons are massless at energies above electroweak symmetry breaking, has this ever been observed experimentally? I looked for it but couldn’t find anything

Simon
  • 23
  • see http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Forces/unify.html – anna v Jun 13 '23 at 04:57
  • I'm a bit surprised this is attracting close votes as it seems fine to me. It simply asks if we have observed electron behaviour at energy densities where the EW symmetry is restored. I believe the answer is "not directly" though it's not my area of expertise. – John Rennie Jun 13 '23 at 08:25
  • Linked. @John Rennie Had the OP asked about High Temperature instead of Energy, the reader wouldn't need to guess about the level of the question; is this a plea for thermal QFT framing? Anyway, search terms might include "EW symmetry restoration"... – Cosmas Zachos Jun 13 '23 at 13:38

1 Answers1

2

The simple answer is no. The highest energy collider we have at the moment is the Large Hadron Collider, and while it is powerful enough to investigate electroweak symmetry breaking indirectly it is not powerful enough to observe the electroweak symmetry restoration.

There is a discussion about how the symmetry restoration might be observed in the paper Electroweak Restoration at the LHC and Beyond: The Vh Channel by Li Huang, Samuel D. Lane, Ian M. Lewis and Zhen Liu. However this is rather technical and I fear it will be unintelligible to the layman.

John Rennie
  • 355,118