The Full Electroweak Interaction: An Autonomous Account

Abstract The precise renormalizable interactions in the bosonic sector of electroweak theory are intrinsically determined in the autonomous approach to perturbation theory. This proceeds directly on the Hilbert–Fock space built on the Wigner unirreps of the physical particles, with their given masses: those of three massive vector bosons, a photon, and a massive scalar (the “higgs”). Neither “gauge choices” nor an unobservable “mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking” is invoked. Instead, to proceed on Hilbert space requires using string-localized fields to describe the vector bosons. In such a framework, the condition of string independence of the $${\mathbb {S}}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>S</mml:mi> </mml:math> -matrix yields consistency constraints on the coupling coefficients, the essentially unique outcome being the experimentally known one. The analysis can be largely carried out for other configurations of massive and massless vector bosons, paving the way towards consideration of consistent mass patterns beyond those of the electroweak theory.