Spontaneous symmetry breaking, gauge theories, the Higgs mechanism and all that

Abstract

A more or less self-contained introductory review is presented of the so-called Higgs phenomenon. This is the mechanism by which, in a certain class of gauge theories, the "photon" and would-be Goldstone scalar mesons conspire together to produce massive vector mesons via a "spontaneous" breaking of gauge invariance. It is conceivable that this is the way in which nature has chosen to unify weak and electromagnetic interactions. It is hoped that a reader of this review will come to understand the meaning of the first three sentences in this abstract and will then be able to proceed to confront a rapidly growing literature in the subject of gauge theories.