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Jim
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I naively imagine that a higgs & an a-higgs can annihilate by photon emission, similar to all SM particles. Is this a-higgs permitted by the SM & does the discovery of the higgs strongly suggest the a-higgs exists ?
Higgs bosons are their own antiparticle and would annihilate each other.Jim said:I naively imagine that a higgs & an a-higgs can annihilate by photon emission, similar to all SM particles. Is this a-higgs permitted by the SM & does the discovery of the higgs strongly suggest the a-higgs exists ?
Way above my head, the Wikipedia article sites an NPR interview with Sean Carroll as its source for this info:nikkkom said:This is an interesting question.
Let me restate it like this: what is the weak isospin and weak hypercharge of Higgs boson?
If they are zero, then how Higgs field with these charges being zero manages to constantly flip e.g. right-chirality electron into left-chirality electron - eR and eL have _different_ weak isospin and weak hypercharge, right?
If they are nonzero, then Higgs particle can't be its own antiparticle.
There's not an anti-Higgs. It depends on the particle. Sometimes particles are essentially their own anti-particle. Like the photon doesn't have a separate anti-particle, and neither does the Higgs.
Even if wikipedia were an accepted source under the Physics Forums rules (and it's not), that wikipedia article doesn't support your claim. Yes, it says that the Higgs boson is its own antiparticle, but it does not say anything about annihilation. The same is true of the NPR interview (which is also not peer-reviewed).stoomart said:Higgs bosons are their own antiparticle and would annihilate each other.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson#Properties_of_the_Higgs_boson
I assumed it would not be an interaction we could replicate, more like something going on around the time of inflation.mfb said:If it would be possble to produce two Higgs bosons on a collision course, Higgs+Higgs -> something else is a possible process, but the Higgs itself decays to "something else" extremely fast, therefore that process has no relevance. Calling it annihilation is a bit of a stretch anyway.
Yes, the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics allows for the existence of an anti-Higgs boson. The SM predicts that every particle has an anti-particle with the same mass but opposite charge. Therefore, if the Higgs boson exists, an anti-Higgs boson should also exist according to the SM.
A Higgs boson and an anti-Higgs boson are essentially the same particle, but with opposite charges. The Higgs boson has a positive charge while the anti-Higgs boson has a negative charge. They also have opposite quantum numbers, which describe their fundamental properties.
An anti-Higgs boson can be detected through its interactions with other particles. In particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), scientists can accelerate particles to nearly the speed of light and collide them, producing new particles such as the Higgs boson and its anti-particle. By analyzing the decay products of these collisions, scientists can identify the presence of an anti-Higgs boson.
At this time, there is no experimental evidence for the existence of an anti-Higgs boson. However, the SM predicts its existence and scientists are actively searching for it in experiments at the LHC and other particle accelerators around the world.
If an anti-Higgs boson is discovered, it would confirm the predictions of the SM and further validate the Higgs mechanism. It would also provide a deeper understanding of the fundamental forces and particles in the universe. However, it is possible that the discovery of an anti-Higgs boson could also lead to new theories and ideas about the Higgs mechanism and the nature of particles.