I've heard the Higgs mechanism explained as analogous to the reason that a photon acts like it has mass in a superconducting field. However, that's not too helpful if I don't understand the latter. Why does this occur, and how?
Answer
A quick answer: "screening" currents in the superconductor are proportional to the vector potential. With an appropriate choice of gauge, the screening current appears as a mass term in the wave equation for the vector potential. From "An Informal Introduction to Gauge Field Theories":
(This excerpt from Google books)
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