Abstract
The basic interactions affecting matter at the particle physics level are electromagnetism, strong interaction, and weak interaction. They can be unified by a Lagrangian displaying gauge invariance with respect to the SU(3) \(\otimes \) SU(2) \(\otimes \) U(1) local symmetry group; this unification is called the standard model of particle physics. Within the standard model, an elegant mechanism, called the Higgs mechanism, accounts for the appearance of masses of particles and of some of the gauge bosons. The standard model is very successful, since it brilliantly passed extremely accurate precision tests and several predictions have been confirmed-in particular, the Higgs particle has been recently discovered in the predicted mass range. However, it can hardly be thought as the final theory of nature: some physics beyond the standard model must be discovered to account for gravitation and to explain the energy budget of the Universe.
The basic interactions affecting matter at the particle physics level are electromagnetism, strong interaction, and weak interaction. They can be unified by a Lagrangian displaying gauge invariance with respect to the SU(3) \(\otimes \) SU(2) \(\otimes \) U(1) local symmetry group; this unification is called the standard model of particle physics. Within the standard model, an elegant mechanism, called the Higgs mechanism, accounts for the appearance of masses of particles and of some of the gauge bosons. The standard model is very successful, since it brilliantly passed extremely accurate pqrecision tests and several predictions have been confirmed—in particular, the Higgs particle has been recently discovered in the predicted mass range. However, it can hardly be thought as the final theory of nature: some physics beyond the standard model must be discovered to account for gravitation and to explain the energy budget of the Universe.
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Notes
- 1.
Martinus Veltman (1931) is a Dutch physicist. He supervised the Ph.D. thesis of Gerardus’t Hooft (1946), and during the thesis work, in 1971, they demonstrated that gauge theories were renormalizable. For this achievement, they shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1999.
- 2.
Peter Higgs (Newcastle, UK, 1929) has been taught at home having missed some early schooling. He moved to city of London School and then to King’s College also in London, at the age of 17 years, where he graduated in molecular physics in 1954. In 1980, he was assigned the chair of Theoretical Physics at Edinburgh. He shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics with François Englert “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle.” François Englert (1932) is a Belgian physicist; he is a Holocaust survivor. After graduating in 1959 at Université Libre de Bruxelles, he was nominated full professor at the same University in 1980, where he worked with Brout. Brout had died in 2011 and could not be awarded the Nobel Prize.
- 3.
Sheldon Lee Glashow (New York City 1932) shared with Steven Weinberg (New York City 1933) and Abdus Salam (Jhang, Pakistan, 1926 - Oxford 1996) the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979 “for their complementary efforts in formulating the electroweak theory. The unity of electromagnetism and the weak force can be explained with this theory.” Glashow was the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia. He and Weinberg were members of the same classes at the Bronx High School of Science, New York City (1950), and Cornell University (1954); then Glashow became full professor in Princeton, and Weinberg in Harvard. Salam graduated in Cambridge, where he became full professor of mathematics in 1954, moving then to Trieste.
- 4.
For a deduction, see, for instance, Chap. 16.2 of Reference [F7.2] in the “Further readings”.
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De Angelis, A., Pimenta, M. (2018). The Higgs Mechanism and the Standard Model of Particle Physics. In: Introduction to Particle and Astroparticle Physics. Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78181-5_7
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