Take and the hypercharge generator on the scalar. The two commuting factors of the electroweak interaction have independent invariant gauge kinetic terms and therefore independent coupling constants. Non-Abelian gauge invariance requires the same for all three generators, while the factor has its own ; no symmetry of this product group requires .
A nonzero Higgs doublet can be rotated by to
The fundamental representation acts transitively on normalized complex doublets, so this fixes an internal direction without changing the vacuum norm. A general infinitesimal generator annihilates this vacuum only if
For real parameters this means and . Thus the connected stabilizer subgroup is one-dimensional:
This proves the claimed electroweak symmetry breaking and identifies the unbroken electric charge generator.
The gauge covariant derivative is
Writing the connection as , its local transformation is . Direct substitution gives . Unitarity then proves
so the scalar kinetic term is gauge-invariant.
At the constant vacuum the gauge covariant derivative becomes
Consequently
where and
The factor is the canonical real-vector mass-term normalization; the displayed electroweak doublet gauge-boson mass matrix contains squared masses when the gauge kinetic terms are canonical.
The electric charge generator acts on gauge fields through the Adjoint representation, not through the scalar's two-by-two matrix. With , the brackets and give , , and neutral . Hence the electromagnetic charge matrix of electroweak gauge fields in the requested basis is
Choose positive gauge couplings by the gauge-field sign convention. Set and . The Weinberg angle rotation diagonalizes the neutral block, while obey . The physical electroweak gauge bosons are
The charges are in units of . Thus the tree-level electroweak gauge-boson masses satisfy , and the unbroken photon is massless.
The electron and neutrino form the left-chiral lepton doublet, while the right-chiral electron is a weak singlet. In four-component notation use chiral projectors and package
Here each entry can be obtained by projecting a Dirac field; only the indicated chirality propagates. The hypercharges follow from : gives , and gives . The minimal theory has no right-handed neutrino.
The gauge-invariant lepton kinetic Lagrangian is
If unprojected Dirac spinors are used as notation instead, insert in the first kinetic term and in the second. The inactive components are not additional physical degrees of freedom. Each term is invariant because the gauge covariant derivative transforms in the same gauge group representation as its field.
No bare Dirac mass term is possible: and vanish by opposite adjoint projectors, while a cross term has an uncontracted weak-doublet index and hypercharge . A neutrino Dirac mass would additionally require the absent right-handed field. A Majorana mass term pairs a chiral field with itself; has hypercharge and has , so neither is invariant. These statements concern quadratic masses before electroweak symmetry breaking, not masses involving scalar insertions.
For the Higgs conjugate doublet, put . The given identity exponentiates to for . Therefore
In particular its weak isospin remains while its hypercharge reverses. Since , both and transform in the trivial representation of the full gauge group. They remain a Lorentz spinor and its adjoint; gauge singlet does not mean Lorentz scalar.
Finally the Yukawa interaction
is gauge invariant: the first term has total hypercharge , and its doublet indices are contracted. At the Higgs field vacuum it becomes . Rephase to make the coefficient real and positive and assemble . Then
This explicitly generates the gauge-invariant electron Yukawa mass, without a bare mass in the unbroken theory.