Twistor googly problem transforms from a curse to blessing in TGD framework

There was a nice story with title "Michael Atiyah’s Imaginative State of Mind" about mathematician Michael Atyiah in Quanta Magazine. The works of Atyiah have contributed a lot to the development of theoretical physics. What was pleasant to hear that Atyiah belongs to those scientists who do not care what others think. As he tells, he can afford this since he has got all possible prices. This is consoling and encouraging even for those who have not cared what others think and for this reason have not earned any prizes. Nor even a single coin from what they have been busily doing their whole lifetime!

In the beginning of the story "twistor googly problem" was mentioned. I had to refresh my understanding about googly problem. In twistorial description the modes of massless fields (rather than entire massless fields) in space-time are lifted to the modes in its 6-D twistor-space and dynamics reduces to holomorphy. The analog of this takes place also in string models by conformal invariance and in TGD by its extension.

One however encounters googly problem: one can have twistorial description for circular polarizations with well-defined helicity +1/-1 but not for general polarization states - say linear polarizations, which are superposition of circular polarizations. This reflects itself in the construction of twistorial amplitudes in twistor Grassmann program for gauge fields but rather implicitly: the amplitudes are constructed only for fixed helicity states of scattered particles. For gravitons the situation gets really bad because of non-linearity.

Mathematically the most elegant solution would be to have only +1 or -1 helicity but not their superpositions implying very strong parity breaking and chirality selection. Parity parity breaking occurs in physics but is very small and linear polarizations are certainly possible! The discusion of Penrose with Atyiah has inspired a possible solution to the problem known as "palatial twistor theory". Unfortunately, the article is behind paywall too high for me so that I cannot say anything about it.

What happens to the googly problem in TGD framework? There is twistorialization at space-time level and imbedding space level.

1. One replaces space-time with 4-surface in H=M⁴×CP₂ and lifts this 4-surface to its 6-D twistor space represented as a 6-surface in 12-D twistor space T(H)=T(M⁴)×T(CP₂). The twistor space has Kähler structure only for M⁴ and CP₂ so that TGD is unique. This Kähler structure is needed to lift the dynamics of Kähler action to twistor context and the lift leads to the a dramatic increase in the understanding of TGD: in particular, Planck length and cosmological constant with correct sign emerge automatically as dimensional constants besides CP₂ size.
   
   
2. Twistorialization at imbedding space level means that spinor modes in H representing ground states of super-symplectic representations are lifted to spinor modes in T(H). M⁴ chirality is in TGD framework replaced with H-chirality, and the two chiralities correspond to quarks and leptons. But one cannot superpose quarks and leptons! "Googly problem" is just what the superselection rule preventing superposition of quarks and leptons requires in TGD!
   
   

One can look this in more detail.

1. Chiral invariance makes possible for the modes of massless fields to have definite chirality: these modes correspond to holomorphic or antiholomorphic amplitudes in twistor space and holomorphy (antiholomorphy is holomorphy with respect to conjugates of complex coordinates) does not allow their superposition so that massless bosons should have well-defined helicities in conflict with experimental facts. Second basic problem of conformally invariant field theories and of twistor approach relates to the fact that physical particles are massive in 4-D sense. Masslessness in 4-D sense also implies infrared divergences for the scattering amplitudes. Physically natural cutoff is required but would break conformal symmetry.
   
   
2. The solution of problems is masslessness in 8-D sense allowing particles to be massive in 4-D sense. Fermions have a well-defined 8-D chirality - they are either quarks or leptons depending on the sign of chirality. 8-D spinors are constructible as superpositions of tensor products of M⁴ spinors and of CP₂ spinors with both having well-defined chirality so that tensor product has chiralities (ε₁, ε₂), ε_i=+/- 1, i=1,2. H-chirality equals to ε=ε₁ε₂. For quarks one has ε= 1 (a convention) and for leptons ε=-1. For quark states massless in M⁴ sense one has either (ε₁,ε₂) = (1,1) or (ε₁,ε₂) = (-1,-1) and for massive states superposition of these. For leptons one has either (ε₁, ε₂) = (1,-1) or (ε₁, ε₂) = (-1,1) in massless case and superposition of these in massive case.
   
   
   
3. The twistorial lift to T(M⁴)× T(CP₂) of the ground states of super-symplectic representations represented in terms of tensor products formed from H-spinor modes involves only quark and lepton type spinor modes with well-defined H-chirality. Superpositions of amplitudes in which different M⁴ helicities appear but M⁴ chirality is always paired with completely correlating CP₂ chirality to give either ε=1 or ε=-1. One has never a superposition of of different chiralities in either M⁴ or CP₂ tensor factor. I see no reason forbidding this kind of mixing of holomorphicities and this is enough to avoid googly problem. Linear polarizations and massive states represent states with entanglement between M⁴ and CP₂ degrees of freedom. For massless and circularly polarized states the entanglement is absent.
   
   
4. This has interesting implications for the massivation. Higgs field cannot be scalar in 8-D sense since this would make particles massive in 8-D sense and separate conservation of B and L would be lost. Theory would also contain a dimensional coupling. TGD counterpart of Higgs boson is actually CP₂ vector, and one can say that gauge bosons and Higgs combine to form 8-D vector. This correctly predicts the quantum numbers of Higgs. Ordinary massivation by constant vacuum expectation value of vector Higgs is not an attractive idea since no covariantly constant CP₂ vector field exists so that Higgsy massivation is not promising except at QFT limit of TGD formulated in M⁴. p-Adic thermodynamics gives rise to 4-D massivation but keeps particles massless in 8-D sense. It also leads to powerful and correct predictions in terms of p-adic length scale hypothesis.
   
   

Addition: Anonymous reader gave me a link to the paper of Penrose and this inspired further more detailed considerations of googly problem.

1. After the first reading I must say that I could not understand how the proposed elimination of conjugate twistor by quantization of twistors solves the googly problem, which means that both helicities are present (twistor Z and its conjugate) in linearly polarized classical modes so that holomorphy is broken classically.
   
   
2. I am also very skeptic about quantizing of either space-time coordinates or twistor space coordinates. To me quantization is natural only for linear objects like spinors. For bosonic objects one must go to higher abstraction level and replace superpositions in space-time with superpositions in field space. Construction of "World of Classical Worlds" (WCW) in TGD means just this.
   
   
3. One could however think that circular polarizations are fundamental and quantal linear combination of the states carrying circularly polarized modes give rise to linear and elliptic polarizations. Linear combination would be possible only at the level of field space (WCW in TGD), not for classical fields in space-time. If so, then the elimination of conjugate Z by quantization suggested by Penrose would work.
   
   
4. Unfortunately, Maxwell's equations allow classically linear polarisations! In order to achieve classical-quantum consistency, one should modify classical Maxwell's equations somehow so that linear polarizations are not possible.
   Googly problem is still there!
   
   

What about TGD?

1. Massless extremals representing massless modes are very "quantal": they cannot be superposed classically unless both momentum and polarisation directions for them (they can depend space-time point) are exactly parallel. Optimist would guess that the classical local classical polarisations are circular. No, they are linear! Superposition of classical linear polarizations at level of WCW can give rise to local linear but not local circular polarization! Something more is needed.
   
   
2. The only sensible conclusion is that only gauge boson quanta (not classical modes) represented as pairs of fundamental fermion and antifermion in TGD framework can have circular polarization! And indeed, massless bosons - in fact, all elementary particles- are constructed from fundamental fermions and they allow only two M⁴, CP ₂ and M⁴× CP₂ helicities/-chiralities analogous to circular polarisations. B and L conservation would transform googly problem to a superselection rule as already described.
   
   

To sum up, both the extreme non-linearity of Kähler action, the representability of all elementary particles in terms of fundamental fermions and antifermions, and the generalization of conserved M⁴ chirality to conservation of H-chirality would be essential for solving the googly problem in TGD framework.

For background see the chapter From Principles to giagrams or the article From Principles to Diagrams.

For a summary of earlier postings see Links to the latest progress in TGD.