The Higgs mechanism is a process in particle physics that explains how certain fundamental particles acquire mass through their interaction with the Higgs field. The Higgs field is a scalar field that permeates all of space, and it is associated with the Higgs boson, a fundamental particle confirmed by experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012.
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In the Higgs mechanism, gauge fields associated with broken generators acquire longitudinal polarizations and masses by absorbing Goldstone modes. Gauge fields of the unbroken subgroup remain massless.
The phrase “absorbing” describes a rearrangement of degrees of freedom, not a collision in which a gauge boson swallows another particle. The gauge symmetry remains a redundancy of the description. A chosen vacuum expectation value leaves a smaller subgroup manifest, while gauge-invariant observables describe the physical masses.
A one-field calculation isolates the mechanism. In an Abelian Higgs model, write a complex scalar field locally as , use , and define . ThenThe second term contains a Proca field mass and its interactions with the radial Higgs boson. A local gauge transformation removes from the scalar field but leaves its information in the longitudinal vector polarization. The electroweak symmetry breaking calculation applies this idea to three broken directions.
