Eur. Phys. J. C (2006) 48: 781-786
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-006-0022-8

Experimental Physics

Probing the Higgs field using massive particles as sources and detectors

¹ Physics Department, Northeastern University, 110 Forsyth Street, Boston, MA, 02115, USA
² Physics Department and INFN, University of Perugia, Perugia, Italy

^* e-mail: john.swain@cern.ch

Received: 2 May 2006
Published online: 24 October 2006

Abstract

In the standard model, all massive elementary particles acquire their masses by coupling to a background Higgs field with a non-zero vacuum expectation value. What is often overlooked is that each massive particle is also a source of the Higgs field. A given particle can in principle shift the mass of a neighboring particle. The mass shift effect goes beyond the usual perturbative Feynman diagram calculations which implicitly assume that the mass of each particle is rigidly fixed. Local mass shifts offer a unique handle on Higgs physics since they do not require the production of on-shell Higgs bosons. We provide theoretical estimates showing that the mass shift effect can be large and measurable, especially near pair threshold, at both the Tevatron and the LHC.