Chiral protection of a fermion mass (source code)

= Chiral protection of a fermion mass

A fermion mass that violates an otherwise restored chiral symmetry is multiplicatively rather than additively renormalized in perturbation theory: corrections vanish with the symmetry-breaking mass or coupling. A chiral gauge representation can forbid a bare mass altogether until a <Higgs mechanism> and <Yukawa coupling> make a gauge-invariant term possible. A scalar-partner bilinear may respect all those ordinary symmetries and therefore needs separate <supersymmetry> protection.