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.