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James Gilliesmet Robert Brout, François Englert and Peter Higgs To INTERVIEW Robert Brout. (Courtesy F Englert.) François Englert . (Courtesy F Englert.) Peter Higgs in the CERN Control Centre. A mechanism for mass James Gillies met Robert Brout, François Englert and Peter Higgs to find out more about their seminal work on spontaneous symmetry breaking in elementary particle physics. There’s a famous photograph of a young Nepalese climber standing coffee table, topped off with a copy of the satirical paper Private Eye. on top of Everest in 1953. It’s the only picture there is, but Tenzing Bound copies of The Gramophone line the shelves, and the living Norgay was not alone. Edmund Hillary, who declined to be pho- room’s prominent feature is a chair, optimally placed to make best tographed, accompanied him to the top. Who got there first? For use of the audiophile Leak hi-fi system. a while, the two climbers refused to be drawn, saying that what A few months later, I met Robert Brout and François Englert in a matters is the achievement. And so it is with a mechanism devel- spartanly furnished office, of the kind frequently occupied by pro- oped in the 1960s to account for the difference between long and fessors emeriti, at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Do we speak short-range interactions in physics. English or French was my first question. “Robert will be happier with In the early 1960s, particle physics had a problem. Long-range English,” came the reply. I hadn’t realised that Brout was a natural- interactions, such as electromagnetism and gravity, could be ized Belgian, and that the two had first worked together in 1959 explained by the theories of the day, but the short-range weak inter- when he’d hired Englert to join him in his work at Cornell University action, whose influence is limited to the scale of the atomic nucleus, in statistical mechanics. could not. The idea that the carriers of the weak force must be heavy, As is so often the way with good ideas, the concept of the genera- while the carriers of long-range forces would be massless could tion of particle mass through symmetry breaking was developed in account for the difference. Conceptually it made sense, but theoreti- more than one place at around the same time, two of those places cally it couldn’t be done: where would the heavy carriers get their being Brussels and Edinburgh. It was a modest beginning for a mass? There was no way to reconcile massive and massless force scientific revolution: just two short pages published on 31 August carriers in the same theoretical framework. 1964 by Brout and Englert, and little more than a page from Higgs Inspired by the new theory of superconductivity put forward in the on 15 September. But those two papers were set to influence pro- late 1950s by John Bardeen, Leon Cooper and John Schreiffer, theo- foundly the development of particle physics right to this day. rist Yoichiro Nambu paved the way to a solution by postulating the All three scientists are careful to attribute credit to their forerunners, idea that a broken symmetry could generate mass (CERN Courier Nambu most strongly. Hints of other influences come from the fact January/February 2008 p17). In doing so he in turn inspired three that Higgs has been known to call spontaneous symmetry breaking in young physicists in Europe to take the next step. particle physics the relativistic Anderson mechanism, a reference to the Nobel prize-winning physicist Philip Anderson who published on the A modest beginning subject in 1963; and in lectures at Imperial College London students I met one of those physicists, Peter Higgs, in autumn 2007 in his are told about the Kibble–Higgs mechanism, in a reference to a later apartment on the top floor of a walk-up block in Edinburgh new paper published by Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen and Tom Kibble. town with views over a leafy square. A slice from an LHC magnet Brout’s inspiration goes back much further, to another place that greets visitors to the apartment, where the style is 1970s chic. Cop- symmetry is broken spontaneously in nature with macroscopic ies of Physics World and Scientific American are piled high on the effects. “Ferromagnetism was a puzzle in 1900,” he told me, and s CERN Courier October 2008 83 CCOctINTERVIEW.indd 83 11/9/08 11:28:53 INTERVIEW was solved by French physicist Pierre Weiss in 1907. Essentially, the scalar boson has been seen. Nature might have chosen to endow symmetry is broken by the Brout–Englert–Higgs (BEH) mechanism particles with mass in a different way, so until the particle is found, because the ground state of the vacuum is asymmetric, rather like the BEH mechanism remains no more than speculation. Whatever the the alignment of the electrons’ magnetic moments in a ferromag- case, the LHC will give us the answer. netic material. In the case of the BEH mechanism, however, it’s There are many stories as to how the BEH mechanism and its structure in the vacuum itself that gives rise to particle masses. In associated particle came to be named after Higgs. The one Higgs the words of CERN’s Alvaro de Rújula: “The vacuum is not empty, told me involves a meeting that he had with fellow theorist Ben there is a difference between vacuum and emptiness.” Lee at a conference in 1967, at which they discussed Higgs’s work. The thing that fills the vacuum is a scalar field commonly known Then along came renormalization, making field theory fashionable, as the Higgs field. Some particles interact strongly with this field, and another conference. “The conference at which my name was others don’t, and it is the strength of the interaction with the field attached to pretty well everything connected with spontaneous that determines the masses of certain particles. In other words, symmetry breaking in particle physics was in ’72,” explained Higgs. the carriers of the weak interaction, the W and Z particles, are It was a conference at which Lee delivered the summary talk. sensitive to the structure of empty space. This is how the BEH Brout, Englert and Higgs have rarely met, but they have much in mechanism can accommodate short and long-range interactions in common. All came to a field, unfashionable with particle theorists a single theory. The long-awaited confirmation of the mechanism is at the time, from different areas of science. “Sometimes you do expected in the form of excitations of the field appearing as scalar things in a domain in which you are not an expert and it plays a bosons (Higgs particles). big role,” explained Englert. “We had no reason to dismiss field Esoteric as this may seem, there are potential astronomical impli- theory because people didn’t use it.” The three also agree on many cations, since what particle physicists call the Higgs field, cosmolo- things – their inspiration for one. “What was interesting me back in gists call the cosmological constant, or dark energy. A substance the early 1960s was the work of Nambu, who was proposing field that appears to make up some 70% of the universe’s matter and theories of elementary particles in which symmetries were broken energy, dark energy made itself apparent as recently as 2003 in spontaneously in analogy to the way that it happens in a supercon- observations of the farthest reaches of the universe. ductor,” said Higgs. Englert said it slightly differently: “We were very impressed by the fact that Nambu transcribed superconductivity in Renormalization terms of field theory,” he said. “That’s a beautiful paper.” Despite the emergence of the BEH mechanism, particle physics still The three are in agreement about the results that the LHC might had a problem in the mid-1960s, because the underlying theory was bring. “The most uninteresting result would be if we find nothing other literally not normal. It predicted abnormal results, such as prob- than that which we’re most expecting,” said Englert. According to abilities of more than 100% for given outcomes. It needed to be Higgs: “The most uninteresting result would be if they found the Higgs renormalized, and that would take the best part of a decade. Brout boson and nothing much else.” “If the Standard Model works, then and Englert toyed with the idea in 1966, but a rigorous renormali- we’re in trouble,” said Brout. “We’ll have to rely on human intelligence zation had to wait until 1971, when Gerardus ’t Hooft, a student of to go further,” said Englert completing the thought. And the most inter- Martinus Veltman at Utrecht University, published the first of a series esting direction for physics? Gravity, they all concur. “Any crumbs that of papers by student and supervisor that would rigorously prove the fall off it would have major effects on the world of elementary parti- renormalizability of the theory. They were rewarded with a trip to cles,” said Brout, “in my heart, gravity is the secret to everything.” Stockholm in 1999 to collect the Nobel Prize in Physics. Physicists and mountaineers have much in common. They are on If Brout, Englert and Higgs had provided a cornerstone of the the whole fiercely competitive, yet collaborative at the same time, Standard Model, ’t Hooft and Veltman gave it its foundations. From and they can be magnanimous to an extraordinary degree. “I was then, theoretical and experimental progress was rapid, and accom- delighted to discover that we are sharing the prize,” Higgs said on panied by a rich harvest of Nobel Prizes.
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