What could the Higgs be made of?

One of the topics I am working on is how the standard model of particle physics can be extended. The reason is that it is, intrinsically, but not practically, flawed. Therefore, we know that there must be more. However, right now we have only very vague hints from experiments and astronomical observations how we have to improve our theories. Therefore, many possibilities are right now explored. The one I am working on is called technicolor.

A few weeks ago, my master student and I have published a preprint. By the way, a preprint is a paper which is in the process of being reviewed by the scientific community, whether it is sound. They play an important role in science, as they contain the most recent results. Anyway, in this preprint, we have worked on technicolor. I will not rehearse too much about technicolor here, this can be found in an earlier blog entry. The only important ingredient is that in a technicolor scenario one assumes that the Higgs particle is not an elementary particle. Instead, just like an atom, it is made from other particles. In analogy to quarks, which build up the protons and other hadrons, these parts of the Higgs are called techniquarks. Of course, something has to hold them together. This must be a new, unknown force, called techniforce. It is imagined to be again similar, in a very rough way, to the strong force. Consequently, the carrier of this fore are called technigluons, in analogy to the gluons of the strong force.

In our research we wanted to understand the properties of these techniquarks. Since we do not yet know if there is really technicolor, we can also not be sure of how it would eventually look like. In fact, there are many possibilities how technicolor could look like. So many that it is not even simple to enumerate them all, much less to calculate for all of them simultaneously. But since we are anyhow not sure, which is the right one, we are not yet in a position where it makes sense to be overly precise. In fact, what we wanted to understand is how techniquarks work in principle. Therefore, we just selected out of the many possibilities just one.

Now, as I said, techniquarks are imagined to be similar to quarks. But they cannot be the same, because we know that the Higgs behaves very different from, say, a proton or a pion. It is not possible to get this effect without making the techniquarks profoundly different from the quarks. One of the possibilities to do so is by making them a thing in between a gluon and a quark, which is called an adjoint quark. The term 'adjoint' is referring to some mathematical property, but these are not so important details. So that is what we did: We assumed our techniquarks should be adjoint quarks.

The major difference is now what happens if we make these techniquarks light and lighter. For the strong force, we know what happens: We cannot make them arbitrarily light, because they gain mass from the strong force. This appears to be different for the theory we studied. There you can make them arbitrarily light. This has been suspected since a long time from indirect observations. What we did was, for the first time, to directly investigate the techniquarks. What we saw was that when they are rather heavy, we have a similar effect like for the strong force: The techniquarks gain mass from the force. But once they got light enough, this effect ceases. Thus, it should be possible to make them massless. This possibility is necessary to make a Higgs out of them.

Unfortunately, because we used computer simulations, we could not really go to massless techniquarks. This is far too expensive in terms of the time needed to do computer simulations (and actually, already part of the simulations were provided by other people, for which we are very grateful). Thus, we could not make sure that it is the case. But our results point strongly in this direction.

So is this a viable new theory? Well, we have shown that a necessary condition is fulfilled. But there is a strong difference between necessary and sufficient. For a technicolor theory to be useful it should not only have a Higgs made from techniquarks, and no mass generation from the techniforce. It must also have more properties, to be ok with what we know from experiment. The major requirement is how strong the techniforce is over how long distances. There existed some indirect earlier evidence that for this theory the techniforce is not quite strong enough for sufficiently far distances to be good enough. Our calculations have again a more direct way of determining this strength. And unfortunately, it appears that we have to agree with this earlier calculations.

Is this the end of technicolor? Certainly not. As I said above, technicolor is foremost an idea. There are many possibilities how to implement this idea, and we have just checked one. Is it then the end of this version? We have to agree with the earlier investigations that it appears so in this pure form. But, in fact, in this purest form we have neglected a lot, like the rest of the standard model. There is still a significant chance that a more complete version could work. After all, the qualitative features are there, it is just that the numbers are not perfectly right. Or perhaps just a minor alteration may already do the job. And this is something where people are continuing working on.