🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <MATT.92Nov8120704@physics.berkeley.edu>, matt@physics.berkeley.edu (Matt Austern) writes:
> In article <BxEuvI.59p@wsrcc.com> alison@wsrcc.com (Alison Chaiken) writes:
> 
>> What is the Anderson-Higgs mechanism?  My very limited understanding
>> of the Higgs mechanism is that a new gauge boson (which would be
>> called a collective mode in solid-state) is postulated to explain how
>> the fundamental particles (which would be the quasiparticles) obtain
>> their different mass energies (which would be the effective mass).
> 
> When high-energy theorists talk about the Higgs mechanism, what they
> mean is somewhat more general than that.  It's just how if a gauge
> symmetry is broken spontaneously, then there aren't any Goldstone
> bosons, but, instead, the gauge bosons become massive.
 
> My understanding is that solid-state theorists do indeed work with
> models in which this happens.  (e.g., massive photons in
> superconductors) 

 Yes, that's the context of Anderson's work, published in 1958 (in the
immediate aftermath of BCS).  There were a number of questions (excuse
me, my memory is very vague on this) concerning the gauge-invariance of
BCS. Anderson showed that the gauge invariance of the electromagnetic
field in a superconductor led to the existence of longitudinal plasmons
with a nontrivial dispersion relation (nonzero effective mass). Five
years later he published a paper that considered the implications of the
mechanism for quantum field theory (Phys. Rev. _130_, 439, 1963.) I don't
 know to what extent he anticipated Higgs et al. in this latter work.

See, for example, _Quantum Many-Particle Systems_, by Negele and Orland,
p. 222.

Robert (getting out of his depth as usual.)