Higgs Models and Other Stories about Mass Generati

Authors: Michael Stöltzner

Publish Date: 2014/08/01

Volume: 45, Issue: 2, Pages: 369-386

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Abstract

The paper studies the topography of the model landscape of the physics in the Higgs sector both within the Standard Model of Elementary Particle Physics SM and beyond BSM in the months before the discovery of a SM Higgs boson At first glance this landscape appears fragmented into a large number of different models and research communities But it also clusters around certain guiding ideas among them supersymmetry or dynamical symmetry breaking in which representative and narrative features of the models are combined These models do not stand for themselves waiting to be experimentally confirmed and elevated to the status of theory Rather do they quite in the sense advocated by Morgan and Morrison enjoy a farreaching autonomy Typically models in the Higgs sector entertain three types of mediating relationships First they mediate between the SM and the data in those instances where the SM contains some uncertainty in the values of its basic parameters Second they mediate between BSM physics and the data by instantiating the core ideas behind these often speculative generalizations of the SM as stories—in Hartmann’s sense—that motivate or justify the respective model Third the fact that Higgs models within BSM physics reproduce the SM predictions in the lowenergy limit functions as a consistency constraint that does not involve any additional autonomy Due to the second type of mediating relationship the representative features of Higgs models BSM are complexThis paper has emerged from the research project “The epistemic dynamics of model development at the LHC an empirical investigation” that was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG and is part of the Wuppertalbased research group “Epistemology of the LHC” see http//wwwlhcepistemologieuniwuppertalde/ Members of the research project were Arianna Borrelli Robert Harlander Peter Mättig Friedrich Steinle and myself This paper initially goes back to a presentation at the 2010 “Models and Simulations 4” meeting in Toronto Earlier drafts were written together with Arianna Borrelli in 2011 and 2012 and submitted to this journal in May 2012 they were drawing upon her continued empirical work in analyzing the model landscape in the Higgs sector and her historical expertise A shortened and coauthored version has since appeared as Borrelli and Stöltzner 2013 In early 2014 the philosophical part of this paper has been revised so as to reflect the fact that in July 2012 CERN announced the discovery of a SM Higgs boson and the ongoing debates in our broader research group I am most grateful to all of them for comments on presentations and earlier drafts of this paper Borrelli 2012 provides a diachronic analysis of one of the model classes mentioned in the present paper in a somewhat different philosophical perspective

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