paper

Chiral Scalar Fields, Custodial Symmetry in Electroweak SU(2)L X U(1) and the Quantization of the Electric Charge

arXiv:hep-ph/9606239 · doi:10.1016/0370-2693(96)00868-4

Abstract

I study the scalar representations of the electroweak group of the Standard Model, which is a subgroup of the chiral group U(N)L x U(N)R with N flavours, for N even, with a special emphasis on their chiral properties and on their behaviour by the discrete symmetries P and CP. They exhaust the scalar and pseudoscalar degrees of freedom of the chiral group, for which a SU(2)L x U(1) renormalizable, anomaly-free gauge theory naturally springs out. It is shown to have a global diagonal SU(2)V symmetry independently of the value of the hypercharge coupling, which becomes local at the limit when the latter vanishes. When acting in the 4-dimensional space of states spanned by the special representations under scrutiny in this paper, the electric charge is one of the three generators of this ``custodial'' symmetry; that the latter stays an unbroken symmetry is thus correlated with the quantization of the electric charge.

15 pages Latex. Minor corrections and addenda. Version to be published in Phys. Lett. B

References in corpus (4)

Cited by in corpus (6)