Gauge-invariant description of Higgs phenomenon and quark confinement

We propose a novel description for the Higgs mechanism by which a gauge boson acquires the mass. We do not assume spontaneous breakdown of gauge symmetry signaled by a non-vanishing vacuum expectation value of the scalar field. In fact, we give a manifestly gauge-invariant description of the Higgs mechanism in the operator level, which does not rely on spontaneous symmetry breaking. This enables us to discuss the confinement-Higgs complementarity from a new perspective. The “Abelian” dominance in quark confinement of the Yang–Mills theory is understood as a consequence of the gauge-invariant Higgs phenomenon for the relevant Yang–Mills–Higgs model.