6533b7ddfe1ef96bd1273c8f

RESEARCH PRODUCT

The Higgs Mechanism and Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking

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As is well known all gauge bosons of a pure Yang-Mills theory are necessarily massless. This is so because any ad-hoc mass term such as $$ m_i^2 A_\mu ^{(i)} A^{(i)\mu } or \sum\limits_{ik} {M_{ik} } A_\mu ^{(i)} A^{(k)\mu } $$ is incompatible with local gauge invariance. It is saidthat W. Pauli hadd evelopednonab elian gauge theory for himself (or knew about it from the work of H. Weyl and O. Klein) before the work of C.N. Yang and R. Mills (1954) but dismissedit because he hadrealizedthat the gauge particles wouldall be massless. As there was only one massless spin-1 particle known at the time (the photon) nonabelian gauge theory was to be rejectedon physical grounds. The few facts that were reportedab out this are collectedin a recent paper by O’Raifeartaigh andStraumann [171] which also gives a more detailedaccount of the earlier work by H. Weyl and O. Klein.