Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2013 iii Paper 45 2 Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-07
Use natural units and the Minkowski metric , and work at tree level with on-shell final particles. Write and, for a final particle of mass , . In the Higgs boson rest frame the Lorentz-invariant phase-space measure reduces toTo obtain this, integrate the momentum delta function to set ; the energy delta function is , whose radial Jacobian is . Hence for an angle-independent final-state spin sum ,There is no initial-state spin average for a scalar, and neither charged-particle pair here requires an identical-particle factor of .
For Higgs decay to two W bosons, the Feynman vertex gives , up to an overall phase. Contracting the two massive vector polarization sums givesThe constant 2 follows from in the contraction, with the last term coming from the two momentum projectors. Putting , the full massive result isThe on-shell two-body width is zero below this threshold; decays through off-shell W bosons into more particles are different channels.
For Higgs decay to a fermion pair, put . The amplitude is , up to an overall phase and a color Kronecker delta. The fermion spin sums and gamma-matrix trace giveThe color multiplicity in a decay width is : only a quark and antiquark with matching colors contribute, so the factor is three rather than nine. ThereforeAgain the on-shell two-body width is zero below threshold. This is a partonic tree-level answer with every mass retained; hadronization is outside the specified calculation.
The W boson channel dominates for large within the tree-level comparison. The widths scale as and , respectively, andThe enhancement comes from longitudinal polarization of a massive vector boson: its polarization vector grows as momentum divided by . Thus the longitudinal pair survives the apparently small factor in the interaction. At masses so large that the scalar sector is strongly coupled, the tree-level extrapolation itself needs corrections.