My Life as a Boson: The Story of "The Higgs"

Abstract

The story begins in 1960, when Nambu, inspired by the BCS theory of superconductivity, formulated chirally invariant relativistic models of interacting massless fermions in which spontaneous symmetry breaking generates fermionic masses (the analogue of the BCS gap). Around the same time Jeffrey Goldstone discussed spontaneous symmetry breaking in models containing elementary scalar fields (as in Ginzburg-Landau theory). I became interested in the problem of how to avoid a feature of both kinds of model, which seemed to preclude their relevance to the real world, namely the existence in the spectrum of massless spin-zero bosons (Goldstone bosons). By 1962 this feature of relativistic field theories had become the subject of the Goldstone theorem.