Mass Generation by Weyl Symmetry Breaking

A massless electroweak theory for leptons is formulated in a Weyl space, W₄, yielding a Weyl invariant dynamics of a scalar field , chiral Dirac fermion fields _L and _R, and the gauge fields , A, Z, W, and W , allowing for conformal rescalings of the metric g and all fields with nonvanishing Weyl weight together with the corresponding transformations of the Weyl vector fields, , representing the D(1) or dilatation gauge fields. The local group structure of this Weyl electroweak (WEW) theory is given by —or its universal coverging group for the fermions—with denoting the electroweak gauge group SU(2)_W × U(1)_Y. In order to investigate the appearance of nonzero masses in the theory the Weyl symmetry is explicitly broken by a term in the Lagrangean constructed with the curvature scalar R of the W₄ and a mass term for the scalar field. Thereby also the Z and W gauge fields as well as the charged fermion field (electron) acquire a mass as in the standard electroweak theory. The symmetry breaking is governed by the relation D ² = 0, where is the modulus of the scalar field and D denotes the Weyl-covariant derivative. This true symmetry reduction, establishing a scale of length in the theory by breaking the D(1) gauge symmetry, is compared to the so-called spontaneous symmetry breaking in the standard electroweak theory, which is, actually, the choice of a particular (nonlinear ) gauge obtained by adopting an origin, , in the coset space representing , with being invariant under the electromagnetic, gauge group U(1)_e.m.. Particular attention is devoted to the appearance of Einstein's equations for the metric after the Weyl symmetry breaking, yielding a pseudo-Riemannian space, V₄, from a W₄ and a scalar field with a constant modulus . The quantity affects Einstein's gravitational constant in a manner comparable to the Brans-Dicke theory. The consequences of the broken WEW theory are worked out and the determination of the parameters of the theory is discussed.