Could the LHC produce the B, W1, W2 and W3 bosons of the electroweak force?

© 2025 Kieron Conway - All rights reserved.

In part 1 of a Journey into Modern Physics, it was stated;

The mediators of the electroweak force have never been seen in accelerators due to the fact that to allow the electroweak force to come into existence, with its mediators, would require an energy of many times more than the LHC can produce in its proton-proton collisions. The LHC is currently the world's most powerful accelerator.

This statement needs some clarification.

The LHC cannot produce B, W1, W2 and W3 bosons as individual particles as symmetry breaking would immediately convert them to the more familiar photon, Z, W1 and W2 bosons of today. No amount of additional particle umph can avoid this.

Unless.......

…..you re-create the background conditions of the early universe in which the electroweak force existed. This goes back to a fraction of a second after the birth of the universe. At this point in its history the universe's temperature was astronomically high, creating a hot, dense, thermal bath of energy. All particles were massless, including quarks and leptons, although they had immense energy. In this extreme environment, the electroweak force flourished and the mass-less B, W1, W2 and W3 abounded, albeit for a short time before the temperature dramatically cooled and the electroweak force split up into the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force of today.

So, it's not the energy of the bosons that's the key factor, it's the temperature of the thermal bath in which the original electroweak symmetry prevailed and all the mass-less bosons of the electroweak force did their mediating stuff. In order to create these primordial bosons, the LHC would first have to re-create this very hot, thermal-bath generating the conditions that restored the original symmetry of the electroweak force.

Now, the LHC can't do this by colliding protons at the maximum energy available (14 TeV), but accelerating lead ions in opposite directions and allowing them to smash into each other, does produce a quark-gluon plasma as indicated in Part 3 of a Journey into Modern Physics, where the ALICE detector at CERN is used to detect such things.

ALICE stands for 'A Large Ion Collider Experiment' and ALICE allows physicists to study the conditions that the universe was in right back at the time after the first quarks condensed out of the super-hot universe and gained mass through the Higgs mechanism. The ability to collide lead ions at such high energies has resulted in a large community of ALICE physicists researching the extreme conditions produced in the early universe.

But can ALICE re-create the electroweak force and its mediating bosons?

What ALICE experiments are doing is filling a tiny area of space with a super-hot thermal bath equivalent to conditions after the electroweak force had split into the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces. The question is, can the LHC produce a thermal bath in this tiny area of space in the collision zone at a high enough temperature to re-create the conditions in which the electroweak force existed, with a high temperature soup of high energy, but massless quarks and leptons?

You would have to heat the quantum fields of space themselves and the matter that they contain to somewhere above 160 GeV for long enough for interactions with the electroweak force bosons to occur, before the quantum fields in the local area of the collision zone cool down, which would happen in the blink of a quantum eye in such an artificially generated environment.

To re-create the electroweak force, you're not just smashing lead ions together, you're actually changing the state of the quantum fields in the collision zone and the LHC, in its current form, simply isn't powerful enough to have such a profound and dramatic effect.

What is needed is SUPER-LHC!

As stated in Part 3 of a Journey into Modern Physics, there are plans afoot to build a 100 Km ring to house first a super-lepton collider and when that reaches the end of its useful life-span, replace it with a super-LHC that may produce the required change in state of the quantum fields for a very short amount of time, in a tiny volume of space to reveal the theoretical bosons of the electroweak force.

Building, first a lepton-collider and then replacing it with a hadron collider is how the LHC came into being in the first place. A tunnel was built, then a lepton-collider (known as LEP), accelerating electrons in one direction and positrons in the opposite was constructed. This accelerator, over a ten year period, made many discoveries and may even have glimpsed the Higgs boson before the LHC, but with insufficient corroboration to claim discovery. Indeed, there were many high-energy accelerators round the globe that may well have glimpsed a Higgs boson before the LHC, but without corroboration. When LEP's useful life ended, the tunnel was cleared out and re-purposed to build the LHC, all of which is explained in Part 3's chapter 'the Rings of CERN'. So it's a question of super-sizing the same process. To go large: build a super tunnel, build super-LEP and when it's done its stuff, build super-LHC

The nature of the electroweak bosons is a very salient point: these bosons are theoretical. They were used in Part 1 to assist in understanding symmetry breaking in the Higgs mechanism and it's a very sound theory, but the existence of the four mass-less bosons is still theoretical. Once the next generation of LHC goes LARGE, operating at 100 TeV (currently it operates at 14 TeV) the theoretical bosons of the electroweak force may make an appearance!

So, we might see the B, W1, W2 and W3 bosons re-created some day, but not with the present level of technology.

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