Breaking of a symmetry

This week-end has been somewhat longer in Italy due to November 1st holiday and I have had the opportunity to read a very fine book by Ian Aitchison: Supersymmetry in Particle Physics – An Elementary Introduction. This book gives a very clear introduction to SUSY with all the computations clearly stated and going into the details of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM). This model was originally proposed by Howard Georgi and Savas Dimopolous (see here) and today does not seem to be in good shape due to recent results from LHC. Authors introduce a concept of a “softly” broken supersymmetry to accomodate the Higgs mechanism in the low-energy phenomenology.  A “soflty” broken supersymmetry is when the symmetry is explicitly broken using mass terms but keeping renormalizability and invariance under the electroweak symmetry group. The idea is that, in this way, the low-energy phenomenology will display a standard Higgs mechanism with a vacuum expectation value different from zero. This fact is really interesting as we know that in a standard electroweak theory the symmetry cannot be explicitly broken as we lose immediately renormalizability but a supersymmetric theory leaves us more freedom. But why do we need to introduce explicit breaking terms into the Lagrangian of the MSSM? The reason is that SUSY is conveying a fundamental message:

There is no such a thing as a Higgs mechanism.

Indeed, one can introduce a massive contribution to a scalar field, the term, but this has just the wrong sign and, indeed, a spontaneously broken supersymmetry is somewhat of a pain. There are some proposed mechanisms, as F or D breaking fields or some dynamical symmetry breaking, but nothing viable for the MSSM. Given the “softly” breaking terms, then the argument runs smoothly and one recovers two doublets and parameter that some authors are fond of.

The question at the root of the matter is that a really working supersymmetry breaking mechanism is yet to be found and should be taken for granted as we do not observe superpartners at accessible energies and LHC has yet to find one if ever. This mechanism also drives the electroweak symmetry breaking. Indeed, supersymmetry properly recovers a quartic self-interaction term but the awkward quadratic term with a wrong sign gives serious difficulties. Of course, the presence of a quartic term into a scalar field interacting with a fermion field, e.g. a Wess-Zumino model, provides the essential element to have a breaking of supersymmetry at lower energies: This model is reducible to a Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model and the gap equation will provide a different mass to the fermion field much in the same way this happens to chiral symmetry in QCD. No explicit mass term is needed but just a chiral model.

This means that the MSSM can be vindicated once one gets rid of an explicit breaking of the supersymmetry and works out in a proper way the infrared limit. There is a fundamental lesson we can learn here: SUSY gives rise to self-interaction and this is all you need to get masses. Higgs mechanism is not a fundamental one.

Dimopoulos, S., & Georgi, H. (1981). Softly broken supersymmetry and SU(5) Nuclear Physics B, 193 (1), 150-162 DOI: 10.1016/0550-3213(81)90522-8

Marco Frasca (2011). Chiral symmetry in the low-energy limit of QCD at finite temperature Phys. Rev. C 84, 055208 (2011) arXiv: 1105.5274v4