Abstract
The simplest example of a phenomenological application of the theory of spinor fields is electrodynamics, originally formulated by Dirac to provide a relativistic description of electrons and photons.
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As a matter of fact, there is an alternative formulation of gauge invariance, associated with the Higgs mechanism, which we shall describe in Sect. 8.2. As remarked at the end of this section, in a particular limit, which is only allowed in an abelian gauge theory, such as QED, the Higgs mechanism corresponds to the introduction of a mass term for the photon. The resulting theory is Stueckelberg’s massive QED.
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© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
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Becchi, C.M., Ridolfi, G. (2014). Gauge Symmetries. In: An Introduction to Relativistic Processes and the Standard Model of Electroweak Interactions. UNITEXT for Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06130-6_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06130-6_6
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