As part of my studies at university, I am doing a project that aims to understand the foundations of the Higgs Mechanism and to ultimately attempt to convey it to an audience in a non technical manner. I am looking for some assistance in finding resources that may help me.
The project aims to understand local gauge invariance and how it leads to massless gauge fields (as in electrodynamics), spontaneous symmetry breaking and how it leads to massless Goldstone bosons, and how the Higgs mechanism combines the two eliminating both kinds of massless particles. I have been told classical abelian field theory should be okay for the majority of this, but that some QFT would be insightful in places.