Higgs field (classical)

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Spontaneous symmetry breaking, a vacuum Higgs field, and its associated fundamental particle the Higgs boson are quantum phenomena. A vacuum Higgs field is responsible for spontaneous symmetry breaking the gauge symmetries of fundamental interactions and provides the Higgs mechanism of generating mass of elementary particles.

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At the same time, classical gauge theory admits comprehensive geometric formulation where gauge fields are represented by connections on principal bundles. In this framework, spontaneous symmetry breaking is characterized as a reduction of the structure group of a principal bundle to its closed subgroup . By the well-known theorem, such a reduction takes place if and only if there exists a global section of the quotient bundle . This section is treated as a classical Higgs field.

A key point is that there exists a composite bundle where is a principal bundle with the structure group . Then matter fields, possessing an exact symmetry group , in the presence of classical Higgs fields are described by sections of some composite bundle , where is some associated bundle to . Herewith, a Lagrangian of these matter fields is gauge invariant only if it factorizes through the vertical covariant differential of some connection on a principal bundle , but not .

An example of a classical Higgs field is a classical gravitational field identified with a pseudo-Riemannian metric on a world manifold . In the framework of gauge gravitation theory, it is described as a global section of the quotient bundle where is a principal bundle of the tangent frames to with the structure group .

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