Gauge symmetries determine the interactions of elementary particles throug the exchange of “messenger particles”: the photon, gluons and W and Z bosons. Where do these gauge symmetries come from? This talk develops the idea that particle physics might be emergent, with its gauge symmetries dissolving in some phase transition deep in the ultraviolet. Emergent gauge symmetries are important in condensed matter physics, associated with so-called topological phase transitions. Perhaps the same might be true also in particle physics? The (meta) stability of the Higgs vacuum implied by data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) may be pointing to some new critical phenomena at very high energy scales, with the Higgs connecting physics at LHC laboratory energies to that in the deep ultraviolet. In the emergence scenario, the dark energy scale comes out similar to the size of light Majorana neutrino masses. These two quantities appear at the same order in a low-energy expansion in inverse powers of the scale of emergence, about 10???????? GeV. Dark matter candidates include axions and phonon-like excitations of degrees of freedom above the scale of emergence. Possible tests of these ideas involve neutrinos as well as gravitational-waves-related signals from early Universe observables which are sensitive to physics at very high energy scales.
 

References:
S. D. Bass, Cracow School of Theoretical Physics Lectures, Acta Physica Polon. B 57 (2026) 4, 4-A7;
https://doi.org/10.5506/APhysPolB.57.4-A7

S. D. Bass, Emergent gauge symmetries in particle physics and cosmology (World Scientific, 2025);
https://doi.org/10.1142/14265