Re: Electron's zitterbewegung

Kit Adams wrote:
> Roger Penrose (in The Road to Reality) and Tony Zee (in QFT in a Nutshell)
> show that the Dirac Lagrangian can be decomposed into two massless fields
> (thus propagating at c), one with left handed helicity and one right handed,
> coupled by a parameter proportional to the rest-mass of the particle.
> Penrose calls the left handed field the "zig" particle and the right handed
> one the "zag" particle. The zigzagging (which occurs on average at the de
> Broglie frequency) allows/forces the particle's average velocity to be less
> than c, and in its rest frame, results in the direction of its spin
> remaining constant. While both the zig and zag fields interact equally
> electromagnetically, only the zig field interacts via the weak interaction.
> Penrose states that the conversion of a zig into a zag and vice versa can be
> viewed as an interaction with the Higgs field.
>
> This picture suggests that massless fields are fundamental and that massive
> fields can be formed from massless fields via the zitterbewegung mechanism,
> suggesting that rest mass is a form of confined kinetic energy.

While Penrose's description is a pretty graphic exposition of our
current paradigm of the Standard Model, I fail to see what an
interaction with the Higgs (which is required instead of a mass term to
maintain gauge symmetry among other things) can have anything to do
with the (obsolete?) concept of the Zitterbewegung as you suggest in
your second paragraph.

-Souvik

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