![]() In Higgs’ second 1964 paper (2) he referred to Anderson’s work in a way which implied that Anderson knew about the non-relativistic counterpart of the Higgs boson. However, he did not discuss any relativistic model and so, since Lorentz invariance was a crucial ingredient of the Goldstone theorem, he did not demonstrate that it could be evaded. The previous year, Philip Anderson had pointed out that, in a superconductor where the local gauge symmetry is broken spontaneously, the Goldstone (plasmon) mode becomes massive due to the gauge field interaction, whereas the electromagnetic modes are massive (Meissner effect) despite the gauge invariance (5). During October 1964, Higgs had discussions with Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen and Tom Kibble, who had discovered how the mass of non-interacting vector bosons can be generated by the Anderson mechanism (4). Higgs’ revised paper drew attention to the possibility of a massive spin-zero boson in its final paragraph. ![]() Higgs had been unaware of their work, because the Brussels group did not send preprints to Edinburgh. Higgs revised the paper and submitted it to Physical Review Letters, where it was accepted (2), but the referee, who turned out to be Yoichiro Nambu, asked Higgs to comment on the relation of his work to that of Francois Englert and Robert Brout, which was published in Physical Review Letters on 31 August 1964, the same day his paper was received. Higgs wrote a second short paper describing what came to be called “the Higgs model” and submitted it to Physics Letters, but it was rejected on the grounds that it did not warrant rapid publication. The other mode of the original scalar doublet remains as a massive spin-zero particle – the Higgs boson. Instead, the Goldstone mode provides the third polarisation of a massive vector field. In a paper published in Physics Letters on 15 September 1964 (received on 27 July 1964), Peter Higgs showed that Goldstone bosons need not occur when a local symmetry is spontaneously broken in a relativistic theory (1). In 1962, Goldstone’s theorem had shown that spontaneous breaking of symmetry in a relativistic field theory results in massless spin-zero bosons, which are excluded experimentally. Prior to the invention of the Higgs mechanism, it was not known how to formulate a consistent relativistic field theory with a local symmetry which could contain both massless and massive force carriers. This unification involves a close relationship between the massless photon, which carries the long-range electromagnetic force, and the W and Z vector bosons, which carry the short-range weak force and must therefore be very massive. ![]() The electroweak theory, which unifies the electromagnetic and weak interactions of elementary particles, has, since 1970, received experimental support to a precision unprecedented in the history of science. A Brief History of the Higgs Mechanism: The scientific work behind the Higgs boson ![]()
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