This paper argues that there is no single universal conception of scientific explanation that is consistently employed throughout the whole domain of Higgs physics—ranging from the successful experimental search for a standard model Higgs particle and the hitherto unsuccessful searches for any particles beyond the standard model, to phenomenological model builders in the Higgs sector and theoretical physicists interested in how the core principles of quantum field theory apply to spontaneous symmetry breaking and the Higgs mechanism. Yet the coexistence of (...) deductive-statistical, unificationist, model-based, and statistical-relevance explanations does not amount to a fragmentation of the discipline, but allows elementary particle physicists to simultaneously pursue a plurality of research strategies and keep the field together by joint convictions about the SM and shared explanatory ideals. These convictions include that the SM both represents a successful explanation of the available particle data and contains aspects in need of further explanation. Especially in the domain of BSM physics, explanatory ideals typically appear as stories motivating the different models and linking them to the whole of the discipline. (shrink)

The paper studies the topography of the model landscape of the physics in the Higgs sector both within the Standard Model of Elementary Particle Physics and beyond in the months before the discovery of a SM Higgs boson. At first glance, this landscape appears fragmented into a large number of different models and research communities. But it also clusters around certain guiding ideas, among them supersymmetry or dynamical symmetry breaking, in which representative and narrative features of the models are combined. (...) These models do not stand for themselves, waiting to be experimentally confirmed and elevated to the status of theory. Rather do they, quite in the sense advocated by Morgan and Morrison, enjoy a far-reaching autonomy. Typically models in the Higgs sector entertain three types of mediating relationships. First, they mediate between the SM and the data in those instances where the SM contains some uncertainty in the values of its basic parameters. Second, they mediate between BSM physics and the data by instantiating the core ideas behind these often speculative generalizations of the SM as stories—in Hartmann’s sense—that motivate or justify the respective model. Third, the fact that Higgs models within BSM physics reproduce the SM predictions in the low-energy limit functions as a consistency constraint that does not involve any additional autonomy. Due to the second type of mediating relationship, the representative features of Higgs models BSM are complex. (shrink)

I discuss Earman's program to achieve an objective account of the Higgs mechanism within the C∗ algebraic approach to quantum field theory. Pointing to three results obtained within this approach, I argue that if one follows Earman and understands the Higgs mechanism as a constraint, it appears to be a genuine quantum phenomenon that does not simply arise through the correspondence principle. This casts further this casts doubts on the validity of the Dirac conjecture that identifies first-class constraints and gauge (...) transformations and that provides a major motivation for both Earman's program and Struyve's demonstration that a gauge-invariant account of the Higgs mechanism can be accomplished at the classical level. (shrink)