Probing the Higgs Field Using Massive Particles as Sources and Detectors
arXiv:hep-ph/0509151 · doi:10.1140/epjc/s10052-006-0022-8
Abstract
In the Standard Model, all massive elementary particles acquire their masses by coupling to a background Higgs field with a non-zero vacuum expectation value. What is often overlooked is that each massive particle is also a source of the Higgs field. A given particle can in principle shift the mass of a neighboring particle. The mass shift effect goes beyond the usual perturbative Feynman diagram calculations which implicitly assume that the mass of each particle is rigidly fixed. Local mass shifts offer a unique handle on Higgs physics since they do not require the production of on-shell Higgs bosons. We provide theoretical estimates showing that the mass shift effect can be large and measurable, especially near pair threshold, at both the Tevatron and the LHC.
6 pages, no figures; Version 2 corrects some typographical errors of factors of 2 in equations 14, 17, 18 and 19 (all of the same origin) and mentions a linear collider as an interesting place to test the results of this paper
References in corpus (5)
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- Search for the Standard Model Higgs Boson at LEP
- Study of Z Pair Production and Anomalous Couplings in e+e- Collisions at sqrt(s) between 190 GeV and 209 GeV
- ZZ production in e+e- interactions at sqrt(s) = 183 - 209 GeV
- Z Boson Pair-Production at LEP