A shift in perspective - or: what makes an electron an electron?

We have recently published a new paper. It is based partially on the master thesis of my student Larissa Egger, but involves also another scientist from a different university. In this paper, we look at a quite fundamental question: How do we distinguish the matter particles? What makes an electron an electron and a muon a muon?

In a standard treatment, this identity is just an integral part of the particle. However, results from the late 1970ies and early 1980ies as well as our own research point to a somewhat different direction. I have described the basic idea sometime back. The basic idea back then was that what we perceive as an electron is not really just an electron. It consists itself out of two particles. A Higgs and something I would call a constituent electron. Back then, we were just thinking about how to test this idea.

This took some time.

We thought this was an outrageous question, putting almost certain things into question.

Now we see: Oh, this was just the beginning. And things got more crazy in every step.

But, as a theoretician, if I determine the consequences of a theory, we should not stop because something sounds crazy. Almost everything what we take for granted today, like quantum physics, sounded crazy in the beginning. But if you have reason to believe that a theory is right, then you have to take it seriously. And then its consequences are what they are. Of course, we may just have made an error somewhere. But that remains to be checked, preferably by independent research groups. After all, at some point, it is hard to see the forest for the trees. But so far, we are convinced that we made at most quantitative errors, but no qualitative errors. So the concept appears to us sound. And therefore I keep on writing about it here.

The older works was just the beginning. And we just followed their suggestion to take the standard model of particle physics not only serious, but also literal.

I will start out with the leptons, i.e. electrons, muons, and tauons as well as the three neutrinos. I come back to the quarks later.

The first thing we established was that it is indeed possible to think of particles like the electron as a kind of bound state of other particles, without upsetting what we have measured in experiment. We also gave an estimate what would be necessary to test this statement in an experiment. Though really exact numbers are as always complicated, we believe that the next generation of experiments which use electrons and positrons and collide them could be able to detect difference between the conventional picture and our results. In fact, the way they are currently designed makes them ideally suited to do so. However, they will not provide a measurement before, roughly, 2035 or so. We also understand quite well, why we would need these machines to see the effect. So right now, we will have to sit and wait for this. Keep your fingers crossed that they will be build, if you are interested in the answer.

Naturally, we therefore asked ourselves if there is no alternative. The unfortunate thing is that you will need at least enough energy to copiously produce the Higgs to test this. The only existing machine being able to do so is the LHC at CERN. However, to do so they collide protons. So we had to discuss whether the same effect also occurs for protons. Now a proton is much more complicated than any lepton, because it is already build from quarks and gluons. Still, what we found is the following: If we take the standard model serious as a theory, then a proton cannot be a theoretically well-defined entity if it is only made out of three quarks. Rather, it needs to have some kind of Higgs component. And this should be felt somehow. However, for the same reason as with the lepton, only the LHC could test it. And here comes the problem. Because the proton is made up out of three quarks, it has already a very complicated structure. Furthermore, even at the LHC, the effect of the additional Higgs component will likely be tiny. In fact, the probably best chance to probe it will be if this Higgs component can be linked to the production of the heaviest known quark, the top quark The reason is that the the top quark is so very sensitive to the Higgs. While the LHC indeed produces a lot of top quarks, producing a top quark linked to a Higgs is much harder. Even just the strongest effect has not yet been seen above doubt. And what we find will only be a (likely small) correction to it. There is still a chance, but this will need much more data. But the LHC will keep on running for a long time. So maybe, it will be enough. We will see.

So, this is what we did. In fact, this will all be part of the review I am writing. So, more will be told about this.

If you are still reading, I want to give you some more of the really weird stuff, which came out.

The first is that live is actually even more complicated. Even without all of what I have written about above, there are actually two types of electrons in the standard model. One which is affected by the weak interaction, and one which is not. Other than that, they are the same. They have the same mass, and they are electromagnetically the same. The same is actually true for all leptons and quarks. The matter all around us is actually a mixture of both types. However, the subtle effects I have been talking so far about only affect those which are affected by the weak interaction. There is a technical reason for this (the weak interaction is a so-called gauge symmetry). However, it makes detecting everything more harder, because it only works if we get the 'right' type of an electron.

The second is that electrons and quarks come in three sets of four particles each, the so-called generations or families. The only difference between these copies is the mass. Other than that, there is no difference that we know of. Though we cannot exclude it, but we have no experiment saying otherwise with sufficient confidence. This is one of the central mysteries. It occupies, and keeps occupying, many physicist. Now, we had the following idea: If we provide internal structure to the members of the family - could it be that the different generations are just different arrangements of the internal structure? That such things are in principle possible is known already from atoms. Here, the problem is even more involved, because of the two types of each of the quarks and leptons. This was just a speculation. However, we found that this is, at least logically, possible. Unfortunately, it is yet too complicated to provide definite quantitative prediction how this can be tested. But, at least, it seems to be not at odds with what we know already. If this would be true, this would be a major step in understanding particle physics. But we are still far, far away from this. Still, we are motivated to continue this road.