Physics · 1964
Broken Symmetries and the Masses of Gauge Bosons
Peter W. Higgs
Overview
Higgs showed how gauge bosons — the carriers of fundamental forces — can acquire mass through spontaneous symmetry breaking without spoiling the underlying gauge symmetry. The mechanism predicts a new scalar field and its associated particle.
Predicted the Higgs boson, confirmed at CERN in 2012, completing the Standard Model.
Key findings
Methods
A theoretical field-theory analysis of a relativistic scalar field coupled to a gauge field, demonstrating that a non-zero vacuum expectation value generates a boson mass term while preserving renormalisable gauge structure.
Keywords
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