The mechanism was proposed in 1962 by Philip Warren Anderson,[4] who discussed its consequences for particle physics but did not work out an explicit relativistic model. The relativistic model was developed in 1964 by Peter Higgs,[5] and independently by Robert Brout and Francois Englert,[6] and Gerald Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, and Tom Kibble,[7] who worked out the results by the spring of 1963.[8] The mechanism is closely analogous to phenomena previously discovered by Yoichiro Nambu involving the "vacuum structure" of quantum fields in superconductivity.[9] A similar but distinct effect, known as the Stueckelberg mechanism, had previously been studied by Ernst Stueckelberg.
These physicists discovered that when a gauge theory is combined with an additional field breaking spontaneously the symmetry group, the gauge bosons can consistently acquire a finite mass. In spite of the large values involved (see below) this permits a gauge theory description of the weak force, which was independently developed by Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam in 1967. Higgs's original article presenting the model was rejected by Physics Letters. When revising the article before resubmitting it to Physical Review Letters, he added a sentence at the end,[10] mentioning that it implies the existence of one or more new, massive scalar bosons, which do not form complete representations of the symmetry group; these are the Higgs bosons. つづく
