| Chronology | Current Month | Current Thread | Current Date |
| [Year List] [Month List (current year)] | [Date Index] [Thread Index] | [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] | [Date Prev] [Date Next] |
For a model in which the Higgs is not fundamental, look up "technicolor".
You're correct that "daughter" particles needn't be fundamental. An
especially interesting example is the decay of a tau lepton (a
"fundamental" particle) into mesons--although if you zoom in to the
fundamental level, the tau is really decaying first into a quark-antiquark
pair, and these particles then "pull additional quark-antiquark pairs out
of the vacuum" to become mesons.
I'm still unhappy with your "rearrangement" vs. "result of leftover
energy" dichotomy. Again, I think you might benefit from studying a pure
QED process such as e+ e- --> mu+ mu-, in which the initial and final
states contain no quarks. Once you understand that reaction, change the
muons to quarks, which pull more quarks out of the vacuum to materialize as
jets of mesons. This is called "e+ e- --> hadrons".
At the LHC, things seem complicated because the initial-state particles
are composite (protons). The vast majority of collisions at the LHC are
rather uninteresting, tearing protons apart and creating lots of mesons
without any two "fundamental particles" colliding close enough to "head-on"
with very much energy exchange. The interesting collisions are those in
which a quark or gluon from inside each proton collide with sufficient
energy/momentum exchange to produce something heavy like the Higgs.
The Higgs is (probably) its own anti-particle, like the photon. Just as
photons can be emitted one at a time by a charged particle that accelerates
(interacts with something else), Higgs particles can be emitted one at a
time by interacting massive particles. Of course, since Higgs particles
are rather heavy, you need much more energetic interactions to produce them.
Have you looked up the principal Feynman diagrams for Higgs production and
decay at the LHC? If not, I think you'll find them helpful.
And again, I highly recommend particleadventure.org.
Dan