Chronology of Milestone Events in Particle Physics - HIGGS 1964B
Chronology of Milestone Events in Particle Physics

HIGGS 1964B

Higgs, P.W.;
Broken Symmetries and Masses of Gauge Bosons
Phys. Rev. Lett. 13 (1964) 508;

Reprinted in
The Physical Review - the First Hundred Years, AIP Press (1995) CD-ROM.

Motivation
In a recent note it was shown that the Goldstone theorem (Nuovo Cimento 19 (1961) 154), that Lorentz-covariant field theories in which spontaneous breakdown of symmetry under an internal Lie group occurs contain zero-mass particles, fails if and only if the conserved currents associated with the internal group are coupled to gauge fields. The purpose of the present note is to report that, as a consequence of this coupling, the spin-one quanta of some of the gauge fields acquire mass; the longitudinal degrees of freedom of these particles (which would be absent if their mass were zero) go over into the Goldstone bosons when the coupling tends to zero. (Extracted from the introductory part of the paper.).

Related references
More (earlier) information appears in
P. W. Higgs, Phys. Lett. 12 (1964) 132;
See also
J. Goldstone, A. Salam, and S. Weinberg, Phys. Rev. 127 (1962) 965;
P. W. Anderson, Phys. Rev. 130 (1963) 439;
J. Goldstone, Nuovo Cim. 19 (1961) 154;

Record comments
Higgs mechanism of mass generation for vector gauge fields.
    
  New Comments List of Comments