Concept

Unitarity gauge

In theoretical physics, the unitarity gauge or unitary gauge is a particular choice of a gauge fixing in a gauge theory with a spontaneous symmetry breaking. In this gauge, the scalar fields responsible for the Higgs mechanism are transformed into a basis in which their Goldstone boson components are set to zero. In other words, the unitarity gauge makes the manifest number of scalar degrees of freedom minimal. The gauge was introduced to particle physics by Steven Weinberg in the context of the electroweak theory. In electroweak theory, the degrees of freedom in a unitarity gauge are the massive spin-1 W+, W− and Z bosons with three polarizations each, the photon with two polarizations, and the scalar Higgs boson. The unitarity gauge is usually used in tree-level calculations. For loop calculations, other gauge choices such as the 't Hooft–Feynman gauge often reduce the mathematical complexity of the calculation.

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Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarity_gauge

About this result

Related courses (4)

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This article describes the mathematics of the Standard Model of particle physics, a gauge quantum field theory containing the internal symmetries of the unitary product group SU(3) × SU(2) × U(1). The theory is commonly viewed as describing the fundamental set of particles – the leptons, quarks, gauge bosons and the Higgs boson. The Standard Model is renormalizable and mathematically self-consistent, however despite having huge and continued successes in providing experimental predictions it does leave some unexplained phenomena.

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