Thursday, February 19, 2009

The Anderson-Higgs mechanism

To understand the Higgs mechanism, imagine that a room full of physicists quietly chattering is like space filled only with the Higgs field....

... a well known scientist walks in, creating a disturbance as he moves across the room, and attracting a cluster of admirers with each step ...

... this increases his resistance to movement, in other words, he acquires mass, just like a particle moving through the Higgs field ...

... if a rumour crosses the room ...

... it creates the same kind of clustering, but this time among the scientists themselves. In this analogy, these clusters are the Higgs particles.

References
P. W. Anderson. Plasmons, Gauge Invariance, and Mass.
Phys. Rev. 130, 439 (1963)
 
Peter Higgs. Broken Symmetries and the Masses of Gauge Bosons.
Phys. Rev. Letters 13, 508 (1964)

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