  These notes form part of a lecture course on gauge theory. The material
covered is standard in the physics literature, but perhaps less well-known to
mathematicians. The purpose of these notes is to make spontaneous symmetry
breaking and the Higgs mechanism of mass generation for elementary particles
more easily accessible to mathematicians interested in theoretical physics. We
treat the general case with an arbitrary compact gauge group G and an arbitrary
number of Higgs bosons and explain the situation in the classic case of the
electroweak interaction where G=SU(2)xU(1). Prerequisites are only a basic
knowledge of Lie groups and manifolds. No prior knowledge of gauge theory or
bundle theory is assumed.
