Higgs Particles from Pure Gauge Fields

Abstract

One of the important outstanding questions in unified gauge theories of weak and electromagnetic interactions is the physical nature of the Higgs particles required by renormalization. Until recently, ideas have been guided by the first historical appearance of such fields in the context of superconductivity. In 1934, Gorter and Casimir¹ first proposed the use of a space time independent order parameter for the description of the temperature behavior of the specific heat in the superconductive phase transition. In 1937, Landau² made the order parameter a local order field by introducing gradient terms permitting the study of spatial fluctuations. This theory has the characteristic that as the temperature of the system passes below a certain temperature T _c, the mass term which stabi-lizes fluctuations changes sign, thereby leading to a non-vanishing expectation value $\left\langle \varphi \right\rangle \equiv {\varphi _0} \ne 0$ of the order field. There is a second order phase transition to an ordered phase.