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Above about $10^{15} K$ (the electroweak unification temperature), the Higgs field doesn't interact with elementary particles to grant them masses. Above this temperature, they are all massless.

This transition from massless, such that they are necessarily traveling at $c$ in all reference frames, to being massive, such that their velocity is frame-dependent seems quite profound.

What determines the stationary frame for each given particle as it makes this transition? Would each particle have some emission as it drops to being below lightspeed? If so, then what would determine the spectra of that emission?

Logan J. Fisher
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  • I don't know anything about EW theory, but is it more profound than a photon hitting a wall? It seems like you are speculating that no inertial observer exists anywhere because no massive object exists anywhere, but can't an inertial observer exist in a vacuum? – RC_23 Jun 13 '23 at 02:40
  • I'm not saying that inertial observers can't exist without massive objects. – Logan J. Fisher Jun 13 '23 at 02:43
  • I'm saying that an individual massless particle will only vary in energy between reference frames, but upon gaining mass it will also vary in speed and will suddenly have its own inertial reference frame. It's unclear what determines said inertial reference frame for that particle. Is it just whichever reference frame the massless particle had the least energy in? – Logan J. Fisher Jun 13 '23 at 02:47
  • A quantum of energy doesn't have an inertial reference frame. Only a macroscopic object has that. I am sure there is a meaningful question in here, but the language in which you are framing it makes it very hard to understand at the moment. In the case of thermodynamic systems with strong interactions near phase transitions we are usually formulating meaningful questions as correlation functions. I don't know if this is a workable strategy in this case or not. – FlatterMann Jun 13 '23 at 04:31
  • Wouldn't the inertial reference frame of a quantum of energy simply be that which minimizes its energy? – Logan J. Fisher Jun 13 '23 at 04:43
  • A quantum of energy that has zero energy doesn't exist. You also need a clock, which happens to be a classical mechanism with a local energy reservoir that releases this energy towards infinity at a steady (or at least predictable) rate, if you want to construct an inertial observer. The entire concept is meaningless for such a case. That's why the standard treatment is the one that is being used for thermodynamic systems. – FlatterMann Jun 13 '23 at 04:52
  • @FlatterMann Let's continue this discussion here. This is my first time making a chat room, so I apologize if I didn't set it up right. – Logan J. Fisher Jun 13 '23 at 05:25
  • Related: Are there massless bosons at scales above electroweak scale? (see my answer). – benrg Jun 13 '23 at 18:12
  • @benrg Interesting, but what about fermions? I know their means of obtaining mass from the Higgs field is a bit more complicated, but ultimately it's still a process that occurs at this same temperature – Logan J. Fisher Jun 13 '23 at 18:18

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