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Higgs Models and Other Stories about Mass Generation

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Abstract

The paper studies the topography of the model landscape of the physics in the Higgs sector both within the Standard Model of Elementary Particle Physics (SM) and beyond (BSM) in the months before the discovery of a SM Higgs boson. At first glance, this landscape appears fragmented into a large number of different models and research communities. But it also clusters around certain guiding ideas, among them supersymmetry or dynamical symmetry breaking, in which representative and narrative features of the models are combined. These models do not stand for themselves, waiting to be experimentally confirmed and elevated to the status of theory. Rather do they, quite in the sense advocated by Morgan and Morrison, enjoy a far-reaching autonomy. Typically models in the Higgs sector entertain three types of mediating relationships. First, they mediate between the SM and the data in those instances where the SM contains some uncertainty in the values of its basic parameters. Second, they mediate between BSM physics and the data by instantiating the core ideas behind these often speculative generalizations of the SM as stories—in Hartmann’s sense—that motivate or justify the respective model. Third, the fact that Higgs models within BSM physics reproduce the SM predictions in the low-energy limit functions as a consistency constraint that does not involve any additional autonomy. Due to the second type of mediating relationship, the representative features of Higgs models BSM are complex.

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Notes

  1. The results of both detectors ATLAS and CMS were published simultaneously as Aad et al. (2012) and Chatrchyan et al. (2012).

  2. For a detailed analysis of different senses of theory-ladenness at the example of previous high-energy physics experiments, see Karaca (2013a). Given that the LHC has been devised to both confirm the existence of a Higgs boson and search for new physics, it exhibits both types of theory-ladenness. For even exploratory experimentation is conditioned by what the respective experimental devices are sensitive for.

  3. Cf. Borrelli’s presentation at the CERN seminar available under https://indico.cern.ch/event/232108/.

  4. For a comprehensive overview on these developments, see the contributions in ‘t Hooft (2005).

  5. This comparison does not intend to suggest that the SM had no viable competitors, but points to their common feature of being formulated on the basis of symmetry groups. The SM simply succeeded where others did not, or did not without additional assumptions.

  6. For an overview, see the collection edited by Kuhlmann et al. (2002).

  7. For a brief overview of these developments, see Pickering (1984a, 165–180). A more detailed study of the emergence of the Higgs mechanism is Karaca (2013b).

  8. In the wake of the confirmation of the SM Higgs boson by the LHC, Peter Higgs and François Englert were awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize.

  9. For various statements of physicists to this extent and a more detailed analysis of this charge against the backdrop of philosophical conceptions of adhocness, cf. Friederich et al. (2014).

  10. Private communication from the physicists in our Wuppertal research group at the time of this paper’s revision.

  11. A shorter and less technical version of the presidential address appears as Earman (2004).

  12. Cf. Buchholz (2008).

  13. Cf. Morrison (2003), Liu and Emch (2005), Karaca (2013b).

  14. I leave it to another occasion to discuss whether there is really a simple alternative between axiomatic QFT and Lagrangian QFT, as the recent discussion between Fraser (2011) and Wallace (2011) suggests.

  15. At this point we do not intend a general defense of the semantic view of scientific theories which has recently come under renewed criticism (cf. Halvorson 2012), but focus on its discussion of models in science.

  16. In applied science, such a framework represents a welcome safeguard against surprises, see Stöltzner (2004).

  17. Cf. Morgan and Morrison (1999, 23–24).

  18. Cf. Hartmann (1999, 327).

  19. For a comprehensive overview of the history of QED and the SM, see Schweber (1994), Pickering (1984a), Hoddeson et al. (1997), on which the following resume is based.

  20. Cf. Sect. 2 and Karaca (2013b).

  21. Susskind (1979) argued that the presence of an elementary Higgs field makes the SM ‘unnatural’, recommending his idea of a composite Higgs as a remedy to the naturalness problem. These points were immediately taken up in the mainstream of high energy physics, and constitute today one of the main criticisms against the SM. Both technicolor and supersymmetry claim to offer a solution for it, cf. Susskind (1984).

  22. For an overview of the current state of BSM physics, see, apart from Bustamente’s paper, Rattazzi (2006) and Altarelli (2010).

  23. I am following here Borrelli’s internal report to our research group of June 2012; cf. also Borrelli and Stöltzner (2013).

  24. This class has been analyzed in more detail in Borrelli (2012).

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  1. University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, 29208, USA

    Michael Stöltzner

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This paper has emerged from the research project “The epistemic dynamics of model development at the LHC: an empirical investigation” that was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and is part of the Wuppertal-based research group “Epistemology of the LHC”; see http://www.lhc-epistemologie.uni-wuppertal.de/. Members of the research project were Arianna Borrelli, Robert Harlander, Peter Mättig, Friedrich Steinle, and myself. This paper initially goes back to a presentation at the 2010 “Models and Simulations 4” meeting in Toronto. Earlier drafts were written together with Arianna Borrelli in 2011 and 2012 and submitted to this journal in May 2012; they were drawing upon her continued empirical work in analyzing the model landscape in the Higgs sector and her historical expertise. A shortened and co-authored version has since appeared as Borrelli and Stöltzner (2013). In early 2014, the philosophical part of this paper has been revised so as to reflect the fact that, in July 2012, CERN announced the discovery of a SM Higgs boson and the ongoing debates in our broader research group. I am most grateful to all of them for comments on presentations and earlier drafts of this paper. Borrelli (2012) provides a diachronic analysis of one of the model classes mentioned in the present paper in a somewhat different philosophical perspective.

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Stöltzner, M. Higgs Models and Other Stories about Mass Generation. J Gen Philos Sci 45, 369–386 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-014-9259-3

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