GENERATING MASS WITHOUT THE HIGGS PARTICLE

The conformal group is added to the gauge group of a model of elementa ry particles based on the fiber bundle formalism. The inertial mass of a particle is interpreted as a manifestation of its interaction with the gauge bosons associated with the generators of the translation and special conformal subgroups. The generation of mass by this mechanism (together with the fact that the Higgs field is not necessarily requi red to effect bundle reduction) makes the Higgs and the Yukawa terms i n the Lagrangian unnecessary: the Lagrangian then consists only of a Y ang-Mills term and a covariantly free matter field term. A particular choice of gauge reproduces the usual mass terms for both fermions and gauge bosons. The ''no-go theorem'' is not violated by the constructio n. The Poincare generators commute with the internal symmetry generato rs after bundle reduction, and there is no mass splitting within symme try multiplets. However, die left-handed/right-handed asymmetry allows the neutrino to remain massless; the definition of matter fields allo ws the up and down quarks to acquire different mass couplings; and the gauge bosons have different mass couplings determined by the inner pr oduct on the Lie algebra of die broken symmetry subgroup. The mass rat ios of the gauge bosons-at tree level-are precisely those predicted by the Standard Model.