Gauge-invariant description of Higgs phenomenon and quark confinement

Understand

We propose a novel description for the Higgs mechanism by which a gauge boson acquires the mass.

• We do not 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.
• This enables us to discuss the confinement-Higgs complementarity from a new perspective.