Macroscopic consequences of the Higgs field and gravitation at the microscopic scale

by Roberto Onofrio (University of Padova and Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)

Wednesday 5 Jun 2013, 14:00 → 16:00 Europe/Rome

Aula Conversi (Dip. di Fisica - Edificio G. Marconi)

he Higgs mechanism is considered responsible for the non-zero mass of all fundamental fermions in the standard model. This has consequences at the macroscopic level, possibly implying peculiar spectroscopic shifts from strong gravity astrophysical sources, violations to the superposition principle for the gravitational force, mass modulation of neutrinos in Higgs-doublets extensions of the standard model. We finally discuss a conjecture in which weak interactions are interpreted as manifestations of gravity at the Fermi scale, emphasizing some phenomenological implications.