  In this paper we discuss the mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking from
the point view of vacuum pairs, considered as ground states of a
Yang-Mills-Higgs gauge theory. We treat a vacuum as a section in an appropriate
bundle that is naturally associated with a minimum of a (general) Higgs
potential. Such a vacuum spontaneously breaks the underlying gauge symmetry if
the invariance group of the vacuum is a proper subgroup of the gauge group. We
show that each choice of a vacuum admits to geometrically interpret the bosonic
mass matrices as ``normal'' sections. The spectrum of these sections turns out
to be constant over the manifold and independent of the chosen vacuum. Since
the mass matrices commute with the invariance group of the chosen vacuum one
may decompose the Hermitian vector bundles which correspond to the bosons in
the eigenbundles of the bosonic mass matrices. This decomposition is the
geometrical analogue of the physical notion of a ``particle multplet''. In this
sense the basic notion of a ``free particle'' also makes sense within the
geometrical context of a gauge theory, provided the gauge symmetry is
spontaneously broken by some vacuum.
  We also discuss the Higgs-Kibble mechanism (``Higgs Dinner'') from a
geometrical point of view. It turns out that the ``unitary gauge'', usually
encountered in the context of discussing the Higgs Dinner, is of purely
geometrical origin. In particular, we discuss rotationally symmetric Higgs
potentials and give a necessary and sufficient condition for the unitary gauge
to exist. As a specific example we discuss in some detail the electroweak
sector of the standard model of particle physics in this context.
