  We propose a mechanism naturally leading to the spontaneous symmetry breaking
in a gauge theory. The Higgs field is assumed to have global and gauged
internal symmetries. We associate a non zero chemical potential to one of the
globally conserved charges commuting with all of the gauge transformations.
This induces a negative mass squared for the Higgs field triggering the
spontaneous symmetry breaking of the global and local symmetries. The mechanism
is general and we test the idea for the electroweak theory in which the Higgs
sector is extended to possess an extra global Abelian symmetry. To this
symmetry we associate a non zero chemical potential. The Bose-Einstein
condensation of the Higgs leads, at tree level, to modified dispersion
relations for the Higgs field while the dispersion relations of the gauge
bosons and fermions remain undisturbed. The latter are modified through higher
order corrections. We have computed some corrections to the vacuum
polarizations of the gauge bosons and fermions. To quantify the corrections to
the gauge boson vacuum polarizations with respect to the Standard Model we
considered the effects on the T parameter. We finally derive the one loop
modified fermion dispersion relations.
