Electromagnetic media with Higgs-type spontaneously broken transparency

• We study a class of electrodynamics models endowed with a symmetric-type skewon field.
• We describe a spontaneous broken transparence phenomenon in some subclass of these models.
• The phenomenon is turned out to be of the Higgs-type known from particle physics.
• We construct a simple explicit 1-parametric skewon model and calculate the corresponding dispersion relation.

In the framework of standard electrodynamics with linear local response, we construct a model that provides spontaneously broken transparency. The functional dependence of the medium parameter turns out to be of the Higgs type.