Symmetry Breaking in the Standard Model

The book provides a non-perturbative approach to the symmetry breaking in the standard model, in this wayavoiding the critical issues which affect the standard presentations. The debated empirical meaning of globaland local gauge symmetries is clarified. The absence of Goldstone bosons in the Higgs mechanism is non-perturbativelyexplained by the validity of Gauss laws obeyed by the currents which generate the relatedglobal gauge symmetry. The solution of the U(1) problem and the vacuum structure inquantum chromodynamics(QCD) are obtainedwithout recourse to the problematic semiclassical instanton approximation, by rather exploiting the topologyof the gauge group.