Non-abelian gauge theories (Yang-Mills)
Teorías gauge no abelianas (Yang-Mills)
- Date
- 1954 · confidence high
- Place
- Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York, United States
- Credited to
- Chen Ning Yang; Robert Mills
- People
- 👤 Chen Ning Yang1922–2025👤 Robert Mills1928–1999
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
What was discovered
They generalise the gauge symmetry of electromagnetism to non-commutative groups, obtaining force fields that interact with themselves. Ignored for years because it predicted massless bosons, it is the mathematical skeleton of the standard model.
Pauli objected in a seminar that the bosons had no mass; the problem was solved by the Higgs mechanism (1964).
What it led to
- Electroweak theory (1967)
- Quantum chromodynamics (1973)
- Standard model
- Mathematics of fibre bundles and topology (Donaldson)
Built on
- Quantum electrodynamics (QED)1947-1949
- Heisenberg's isospin symmetry
- Kaluza-Klein theory