Are the weak force bosons truly short ranged or do they acquire mass?

[johne1618]

As I understand it in a normal superconductor electromagnetic fields are extinguished by opposing fields produced by induced superconducting currents. This causes photons to only penetrate a short distance into a superconductor.

I understand that one can imagine the Higgs field as a kind of superconductor in normal space.

Thus by analogy the weak nuclear force fields are extingushed by opposing weak fields produced by Higgs currents.

Thus the weak force particles, the Z, W+, W- bosons only travel over short distances before they are extinguished.

Does this mean that it is more correct to say that the weak force bosons are short ranged rather than to say they acquire mass or are the two statements equivalent?

 

[Bill_K]

I understand that one can imagine the Higgs field as a kind of superconductor in normal space.

I don't know much about Anderson's work, but here is a quote from Peter Woit's blog:

What Philip Anderson realized and worked out in the summer of 1962 was that, when you have both gauge symmetry and spontaneous symmetry breaking, the Nambu-Goldstone massless mode can combine with the massless gauge field modes to produce a physical massive vector field. This is what happens in superconductivity, a subject about which Anderson was (and is) one of the leading experts.

What I gather is that superconductivity provides an analogous situation. But to say that the Higgs field *is* a kind of superconductor, I think overstates it.