Only Electron Higgs Particles

[NavajoEverclear]

I am currently reading Lee Smolin's Life of the Cosmos. In the begginning just explains the basics of the currently accepted physics stuff. I just learned about Higgs particles. It says that the Electron and the Neutrino are the same particle exactly, and only behave differently because the universe is filled with a gas of only electron-specificy Higgs particles. What i dont understand is that if they are exactly the same particle, how can there be an electron specific type of the Higgs thingy? Wouldn't that imply something different about the electron? If they are both exactly the same, and the Higgs make the electrons behave as they do, why don't all the neutrinos become electrons?

[NavajoEverclear]

please help me with the higgs!

[bascule]

I think what you're wondering about is when the symmetry between the Higgs boson and the electron/neutrino were broken... the particles take on different properties as the universe cools...

 

As to at what temperature these particles begin behaving identically, I haven't a clue... but that's what the physics experts are here for... the Higgs boson is, of course, theoretical until it can be detected in something like the LHC

[DQW]

Never heard of an "electron-specific Higgs particle".

 

In any case, you should not believe very much in Smolin's book when it comes to neutrinos. The book was published in 1997, about a year before the SuperKamiokande group announced a non-zero lower bound on the neutrino mass.

 

Current understanding of neutrino mass (and its incorporation into the Standard Model) comes from the picture based on Majorana neutrinos (and also involves interaction with a Higg's Boson, to acquire mass), if I'm not mistaken.

[NavajoEverclear]

electron-specific higgs wasn't his words exactly, just that electrons and Neutrinos are the same particle and only behave differently because only one type of higgs particle exists because that is the stable state.

DQW-- thanks, but dont really understand what you are saying, i really know very little about Physics

[DQW]

Really, there's not much to be understood there. All I'm saying is that our understanding of neutrinos has changed considerably since after Smolin wrote his book.

 

The rest is just keywords you can Google for more info on the subject.

[Severian]

It really depends on what you regard as 'the same particle'.

 

Even before the Higgs boson comes along, the electron and neutrino and different components of an 'isospin vector'. This means that they have exactly the same quantum numbers as each other apart from 'isospin'. So they are not (in my opinion) ever the same particle (although one could in principle claim they are because you could regard the ispospin doublet as the 'particle' and the electron and neutrino as different facets of the same particle).

 

When you include the Higgs into the picture, they get a further difference - they have different couplings to the Higgs boson. We still don't know why different particles have different couplings. They are just added to the theory by hand.