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1964 PRL symmetry breaking papers
The 1964 PRL symmetry breaking papers were written by three teams who proposed related but different approaches to explain how mass could arise in local gauge theories. These three papers were written by: Robert Brout and François Englert; Peter Higgs; and Gerald Guralnik, C. Richard Hagen, and Tom Kibble (GHK). They are credited with the theory of the Higgs mechanism and the prediction of the Higgs field and Higgs boson. Together, these provide a theoretical means by which Goldstone's theorem (a problematic limitation affecting early modern particle physics theories) can be avoided. They showed how gauge bosons can acquire non-zero masses as a result of spontaneous symmetry breaking within gauge invariant models of the universe.
As such, these form the key element of the electroweak theory that forms part of the Standard Model of particle physics, and of many models, such as the Grand Unified Theory, that go beyond it. The papers that introduce this mechanism were published in Physical Review Letters (PRL) and were each recognized as milestone papers by PRL's 50th anniversary celebration. All of the six physicists were awarded the 2010 J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics for this work; Brout, Englert and Higgs received the 2004 Wolf Prize in Physics; and in 2013 Englert and Higgs received the Nobel Prize in Physics.
On 4 July 2012, the two main experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (ATLAS and CMS) at CERN confirmed independently the existence of a previously unknown particle with a mass of about 125 GeV/c2 (about 133 proton masses, on the order of 10−25 kg), which is "consistent with the Higgs boson" and widely believed to be the Higgs boson.
In the mid-20th century, physicists were developing a mathematical framework to describe the fundamental particles and forces of nature, a concept known as gauge theory. This approach was very promising because it offered a way to build a consistent and comprehensive model of physics. A significant challenge, however, arose when trying to explain why some particles have mass. Early versions of these theories predicted that certain force-carrying particles should be massless, which contradicted experimental evidence.
A major hurdle was a theoretical roadblock known as Goldstone's theorem. This theorem suggested that whenever a fundamental symmetry in a theory is "spontaneously broken"—a process necessary to give particles mass—new, unwanted massless particles must appear. The 1964 papers provided a crucial insight, showing how, in the specific case of gauge theories, Goldstone's theorem could be sidestepped. This allowed for the creation of theories where force-carrying particles could have mass without introducing these problematic massless particles. The solution they described is now known as the Higgs mechanism.
Particle physicists study matter made from fundamental particles whose interactions are mediated by exchange particles known as force carriers. At the beginning of the 1960s a number of these particles had been discovered or proposed, along with theories suggesting how they relate to each other, some of which had already been reformulated as field theories in which the objects of study are not particles and forces, but quantum fields and their symmetries.[citation needed] However, attempts to unify known fundamental forces such as the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force were known to be incomplete. One known omission was that gauge invariant approaches, including non-abelian models such as Yang–Mills theory (1954), which held great promise for unified theories, also seemed to predict known massive particles as massless. Goldstone's theorem, relating to continuous symmetries within some theories, also appeared to rule out many obvious solutions, since it appeared to show that zero-mass particles would have to also exist that were "simply not seen". According to Gerald Guralnik, physicists had "no understanding" how these problems could be overcome in 1964. In 2014, Guralnik and Carl Hagen wrote a paper that contended that even after 50 years there is still widespread misunderstanding, by physicists and the Nobel Committee, of the Goldstone boson role. This paper, published in Modern Physics Letters A, turned out to be Guralnik's last published work.
Particle physicist and mathematician Peter Woit summarised the state of research at the time:
The Higgs mechanism is a process by which vector bosons can get rest mass without explicitly breaking gauge invariance, as a byproduct of spontaneous symmetry breaking. The mathematical theory behind spontaneous symmetry breaking was initially conceived and published within particle physics by Yoichiro Nambu in 1960, the concept that such a mechanism could offer a possible solution for the "mass problem" was originally suggested in 1962 by Philip Anderson, and Abraham Klein and Benjamin Lee showed in March 1964 that Goldstone's theorem could be avoided this way in at least some non-relativistic cases and speculated it might be possible in truly relativistic cases.
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1964 PRL symmetry breaking papers
The 1964 PRL symmetry breaking papers were written by three teams who proposed related but different approaches to explain how mass could arise in local gauge theories. These three papers were written by: Robert Brout and François Englert; Peter Higgs; and Gerald Guralnik, C. Richard Hagen, and Tom Kibble (GHK). They are credited with the theory of the Higgs mechanism and the prediction of the Higgs field and Higgs boson. Together, these provide a theoretical means by which Goldstone's theorem (a problematic limitation affecting early modern particle physics theories) can be avoided. They showed how gauge bosons can acquire non-zero masses as a result of spontaneous symmetry breaking within gauge invariant models of the universe.
As such, these form the key element of the electroweak theory that forms part of the Standard Model of particle physics, and of many models, such as the Grand Unified Theory, that go beyond it. The papers that introduce this mechanism were published in Physical Review Letters (PRL) and were each recognized as milestone papers by PRL's 50th anniversary celebration. All of the six physicists were awarded the 2010 J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics for this work; Brout, Englert and Higgs received the 2004 Wolf Prize in Physics; and in 2013 Englert and Higgs received the Nobel Prize in Physics.
On 4 July 2012, the two main experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (ATLAS and CMS) at CERN confirmed independently the existence of a previously unknown particle with a mass of about 125 GeV/c2 (about 133 proton masses, on the order of 10−25 kg), which is "consistent with the Higgs boson" and widely believed to be the Higgs boson.
In the mid-20th century, physicists were developing a mathematical framework to describe the fundamental particles and forces of nature, a concept known as gauge theory. This approach was very promising because it offered a way to build a consistent and comprehensive model of physics. A significant challenge, however, arose when trying to explain why some particles have mass. Early versions of these theories predicted that certain force-carrying particles should be massless, which contradicted experimental evidence.
A major hurdle was a theoretical roadblock known as Goldstone's theorem. This theorem suggested that whenever a fundamental symmetry in a theory is "spontaneously broken"—a process necessary to give particles mass—new, unwanted massless particles must appear. The 1964 papers provided a crucial insight, showing how, in the specific case of gauge theories, Goldstone's theorem could be sidestepped. This allowed for the creation of theories where force-carrying particles could have mass without introducing these problematic massless particles. The solution they described is now known as the Higgs mechanism.
Particle physicists study matter made from fundamental particles whose interactions are mediated by exchange particles known as force carriers. At the beginning of the 1960s a number of these particles had been discovered or proposed, along with theories suggesting how they relate to each other, some of which had already been reformulated as field theories in which the objects of study are not particles and forces, but quantum fields and their symmetries.[citation needed] However, attempts to unify known fundamental forces such as the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force were known to be incomplete. One known omission was that gauge invariant approaches, including non-abelian models such as Yang–Mills theory (1954), which held great promise for unified theories, also seemed to predict known massive particles as massless. Goldstone's theorem, relating to continuous symmetries within some theories, also appeared to rule out many obvious solutions, since it appeared to show that zero-mass particles would have to also exist that were "simply not seen". According to Gerald Guralnik, physicists had "no understanding" how these problems could be overcome in 1964. In 2014, Guralnik and Carl Hagen wrote a paper that contended that even after 50 years there is still widespread misunderstanding, by physicists and the Nobel Committee, of the Goldstone boson role. This paper, published in Modern Physics Letters A, turned out to be Guralnik's last published work.
Particle physicist and mathematician Peter Woit summarised the state of research at the time:
The Higgs mechanism is a process by which vector bosons can get rest mass without explicitly breaking gauge invariance, as a byproduct of spontaneous symmetry breaking. The mathematical theory behind spontaneous symmetry breaking was initially conceived and published within particle physics by Yoichiro Nambu in 1960, the concept that such a mechanism could offer a possible solution for the "mass problem" was originally suggested in 1962 by Philip Anderson, and Abraham Klein and Benjamin Lee showed in March 1964 that Goldstone's theorem could be avoided this way in at least some non-relativistic cases and speculated it might be possible in truly relativistic cases.