Electroweak unification
Unificación electrodébil
- Date
- 1961-1968 · confidence high
- Place
- MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States / Imperial College, London
- Credited to
- Steven Weinberg; Abdus Salam; Sheldon Glashow
- People
- 👤 Abdus Salam1926–1996👤 Sheldon Lee Glashow1932–👤 Steven Weinberg1933–2021
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
What was discovered
Electromagnetism and the weak interaction are manifestations of a single force with SU(2)xU(1) symmetry broken by the Higgs mechanism, which predicts the W and Z bosons and neutral currents. The third great unification of physics and the core of the standard model.
Weinberg's paper 'A Model of Leptons' (1967) was almost ignored until 't Hooft's proof in 1971. 1979 Nobel Prize.
What it led to
- Neutral currents (1973) and W and Z bosons (1983)
- Standard model
- Grand unification theories
- Higgs boson
Built on
- Non-abelian gauge theories (Yang-Mills)1954
- Higgs mechanism1964
- Glashow model (1961)
- Yang-Mills theories
- Renormalisability proved by 't Hooft and Veltman (1971)