The mechanism was discovered by Anderson. They had to give it to Higgs because otherwise people might realize that theoretical particle physicists don’t do anything real (sorry but not sorry)
"From 1949 to 1984, Anderson was employed by Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, where he worked on a wide variety of problems in condensed matter physics.
During this period he developed:
- what is now called Anderson localization (the idea that extended states can be localized by the presence of disorder in a system)
- Anderson's theorem (concerning impurity scattering in superconductors);
- invented the Anderson Hamiltonian, which describes the site-wise interaction of electrons in a transition metal; proposed symmetry breaking within particle physics (this played a role in the development of the Standard Model and the development of the theory behind the Higgs mechanism, which in turn generates mass in some elementary particles);
- created the pseudospin approach to the BCS theory of superconductivity;
- made seminal studies of non-s-wave pairing (both symmetry-breaking and microscopic mechanism) in the superfluidity of He3,
> The mechanism was proposed in 1962 by Philip Warren Anderson,[2] following work in the late 1950s on symmetry breaking in superconductivity and a 1960 paper by Yoichiro Nambu that discussed its application within particle physics.
