Non-abelian supercurrents and de Sitter ground state in electroweak theory

Abstract

We show that gauge symmetry breaking in the Weinberg-Salam model can be implemented by a mere change of variables and without any explicit gauge fixing. The change of variables entails the concept of supercurrent which has been widely employed in the study of superconductivity. It also introduces a separation between the isospin and the hypercharge, suggesting that our new variables describe a strongly coupled regime of the electroweak theory. We discuss the description of various embedded topological defects in terms of these variables. We also propose that in terms of our variables the Weinberg-Salam model can be interpreted in terms of a gravity theory with the modulus of Higgs field as dilaton and the de Sitter space as the ground state. © 2008 SISSA.