https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/201713703009
Gauge-independent Higgs mechanism and the implications for quark confinement
Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, Chiba University, Chiba 263-8522, Japan
a e-mail: kondok@faculty.chiba-u.jp
Published online: 22 March 2017
We propose a gauge-invariant description for the Higgs mechanism by which a gauge boson acquires the mass. We do not need to assume spontaneous breakdown of gauge symmetry signaled by a non-vanishing vacuum expectation value of the scalar field. In fact, we give a manifestly gauge-invariant description of the Higgs mechanism in the operator level, which does not rely on spontaneous symmetry breaking. For concreteness, we discuss the gauge-Higgs models with U(1) and SU(2) gauge groups explicitly. This enables us to discuss the confinement-Higgs complementarity from a new perspective.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2017
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
