In the present paper we study the limit of zero mass in nonabelian gauge theories both with Higgs mechanism and in the nonlinear realization of the gauge group (Stueckelberg mass). We argue that in the first case the longitudinal modes undergo a meta
morphosis process to the Goldstone scalar modes, while in the second we guess a decoupling process associated to a phase transformation. The two scenarios yield strikingly different behaviors at high energy, mainly ascribed to the presence of a massless Higgs doublet among the physical modes in the case of Higgs mechanism (i.e. not only the Higgs boson). The aim of this work is to show that the problem of unitarity at high energy in nonabelian gauge theory with no Higgs boson can open new perspectives in quantum field theory.
A consistent strategy for the subtraction of the divergences in the nonlinearly realized Electroweak Model in the loop expansion is presented. No Higgs field enters into the perturbative spectrum. The local functional equation (LFE), encoding the inv
ariance of the SU(2) Haar measure under local left SU(2) transformations, the Slavnov-Taylor identity, required in order to fulfill physical unitarity, and the Landau gauge equation hold in the nonlinearly realized theory. The quantization is performed in the Landau gauge for the sake of simplicity and elegance. The constraints on the admissible interactions arising from the Weak Power-Counting (WPC) are discussed. The same symmetric pattern of the couplings as in the Standard Model is shown to arise, as a consequence of the defining functional identities and the WPC. However, two independent mass invariants in the vector meson sector are possible, i.e. no tree-level Weinberg relation holds between the Z and W mass. Majorana neutrino masses can be implemented in the nonlinearly realized Electroweak Model in a way compatible with the WPC and all the symmetries of the theory.
