Higgs mechanism
Mecanismo de Higgs (ruptura espontánea de simetría y origen de la masa)
- Date
- 1964 · confidence high
- Place
- University of Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom / Brussels, Belgium
- Credited to
- Peter Higgs; François Englert; Robert Brout; Gerald Guralnik; Carl Hagen; Tom Kibble
- People
- 👤 François Englert1932–2026👤 Peter Higgs1929–2024👤 Robert Brout1928–2011
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What was discovered
A scalar field filling the vacuum spontaneously breaks the gauge symmetry and gives mass to the force bosons (and to fermions) without destroying renormalisability, leaving a scalar particle as its trace. It solves the problem of mass in Yang-Mills theories.
Three independent papers in 1964: Brout-Englert (Brussels), Higgs (Edinburgh) and Guralnik-Hagen-Kibble (Imperial College). 2013 Nobel Prize awarded only to Higgs and Englert.
What it led to
- Weinberg and Salam's electroweak theory
- Standard model
- Discovery of the Higgs boson (2012)
- Cosmology of scalar fields (inflation)
Built on
- Non-abelian gauge theories (Yang-Mills)1954
- BCS theory and the Meissner effect (Anderson's analogy, 1963)
- Goldstone's theorem
- Yang-Mills theories