Enquiring the Higgs Mechanism: A Path for Teachers

In the last three years, after the discovery at CERN of the Higgs boson in 2012, the request for a comprehensible high school path on the Higgs mechanism has been growing and growing among teachers and students. In fact, many web sites with simple approaches can be found on this item, but most of them are only popular description with very poor physical content, while some others are too technical to be relevant at secondary school level. From a didactical point of view, the Brout-Englert-Higgs (BEH) mechanism, that is the Standard-Model way of giving a mass to the theoretically massless W± and Z0 , can be considered a conceptual knot that puts together most of the fundamental ideas and concepts of classical and modern physics. Among them: mass, energy, symmetries and interactions. For this purpose a deep didactical reconstruction is fundamental. Since this path about the BEH mechanism is addressed to teachers for inspiring their work, it does not make use of too difficult mathematical tools, so that it can be really implemented in classroom with students. Our starting point consists of some considerations on the Heisenberg uncertainty relations, the range of interactions, and the masses of the exchanged bosons that “mediate” the interaction. Then, some interesting experiments on superconductivity that can be addressed to secondary school teachers (and students), and that can be investigated within a guided IBSE (Inquiry Based Science Education) methodology, are presented and discussed. In this context, a particular emphasis is given to the Meissner-Ochsenfeld effect (that is the expulsion of the magnetic field from the bulk of a superconductor), for its strong analogy with the BEH mechanism. Moreover, some interesting experiments on eddy currents provide a didactical tool towards the way by which additional “fictitious mass” can be given to an object by “hidden” interactions. In the end, putting together all the previously written considerations, the development of the basic ideas of the Higgs mechanism are developed.