This is a great paper, and makes a great point. There is a lot to digest on friday evening so I may have missed some point, but starting with this from paper:
"Fans of the unitary gauge sometimes do not seem to
realize that once the possibility of ⃗θ gradients is accepted,
the argument is over. Instead, they claim that imposing
the unitary gauge turns such gradients into collections
of short-lived, massive gauge bosons, which decay on the
time scale of weak interactions. This works only if you
give up locality - the residual O(3) symmetry must be
broken the same way across the whole universe - and
forget to quantize."
Is the time scale used for the selection mechanism largely at the electroweak scale? How fast does the dyanmic mechanism evolve before final selection? I may be naive on this still, but the impression is that sufficient time must ellapse to filter out the non viable vacuum states and once the more stable becomes apparent then some process must select one that is viable. Am I understanding correctly?
