Instruct: Identify the main and secondary category of Arxiv papers based on the titles and abstracts
Query: Physical Degrees of Freedom in Higgs Models   Despite the clear-cut prediction and subsequent experimental detection of the
weak interaction bosons, the Higgs sector of the standard model of elementary
particle physics has long remained one of its most obscure features. Here, it
is demonstrated through a very basic argument that standard accounts of the
Higgs mechanism suffer from a serious conceptual consistency problem, in that
they incorrectly identify physical degrees of freedom. The point at issue, is
that the reasoning which leads to a removal of the unphysical excitation modes
is valid in both phases of the theory - i.e. both after and before the phase
transition occurs. Consistently removing unphysical degrees of freedom implies
a discrepancy in the number of physical degrees of freedom. In particular, the
longitudinally polarized, massive gauge boson degrees of freedom do not have
physical counterparts before the phase transition and are thus effectively
"created ex nihilio" at the transition, within the context of ordinary Higgs
models. Possible scenarios for removing the discrepancy are briefly considered.
The results obtained here strongly indicate that although standard,
perturbative formulations of the Higgs mechanism provide a convenient
parametrization of electroweak physics over a certain range of scales, they
cannot provide a sensible explanation of all relevant physical degrees of
freedom involved.

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The categories of this paper are: chem-ph
1
The categories of this paper are: cs
16
The categories of this paper are: stat
29
The categories of this paper are: funct-an
28
The categories of this paper are: alg-geom
26
The categories of this paper are: bayes-an
13
The categories of this paper are: quant-ph
31
The categories of this paper are: ao-sci
15
The categories of this paper are: nucl-ex
11
The categories of this paper are: hep-lat
21
The categories of this paper are: adap-org
24
The categories of this paper are: dg-ga
35
The categories of this paper are: mtrl-th
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The categories of this paper are: acc-phys
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The categories of this paper are: cmp-lg
32
The categories of this paper are: atom-ph