Symmetric Mass Generation: a new paradigm

by Anna Hasenfratz

Tuesday 20 May 2025, 16:00 → 18:00 Europe/Zurich

4/2-037 - TH meeting room (CERN)

Symmetric Mass Generation (SMG) is a new paradigm to generate massive bound states from massless fermions without breaking any continuous symmetries. The SMG phase is confining but chirally symmetric, without Goldstone bosons. The necessary condition for such a phase is the cancellation of all, continuous and discrete, 't Hooft anomalies. 
SMG was originally discovered in lower dimensional condensed matter systems, but by now we have evidence that it also occurs in 3+1 dimensional gauge-fermion systems.
If confirmed, SMG could provide a new UV completion of the standard model and give rise to new scenarios for beyond standard model physics.
In this talk I review the basic properties of SMG and show evidence of UV complete SMG phases both in SU(2) and SU(3) gauge-fermion systems. While the results are from lattice simulations, this is not a lattice talk. I will not discuss details of the simulations.

Hasenfratz.pdf