Paper detail

Weyl geometric gravity and "breaking" of electroweak symmetry

A Weyl geometric scale covariant approach to gravity due to Omote, Dirac, and Utiyama (1971ff) is reconsidered. It can be extended to the electroweak sector of elementary particle fields, taking into account their basic scaling freedom. Already Cheng (1988) indicated that electroweak symmetry breaking, usually attributed to the Higgs field with a boson expected at $0.1 - 0.3 \,TeV$, may be due to a coupling between Weyl geometric gravity and electroweak interactions. Weyl geometry seems to be well suited for treating questions of elementary particle physics, which relate to scale invariance and its "breaking". This setting suggests the existence of a scalar field boson at the surprisingly low energy of $\sim 1\, eV$. That may appear unlikely; but, as a payoff, the acquirement of mass arises as a result of coupling to gravity in agreement with the understanding of mass as the gravitational charge of fields.