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Nobel prize to S. Weinberg awarded in 1979. Co-winners S. L. Glashow and A. Salam "for their contribution to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, including, inter alia, the prediction of the weak neutral current'' |  |
WEINBERG 1967
Weinberg, S.;
A Model of Leptons
Phys. Rev. Lett. 19 (1967) 1264;
Reprinted in
The Physical Review - the First Hundred Years, AIP Press (1995) 1052.
Summary
Leptons interact only with photons, and with the intermediate bosons that presumably mediate weak interactions. What could be more natural than to unite (E. Fermi, Z. Phys. 88 (1934) 161) these spin-one bosons into a multiplet of gauge fields? Standing in the way of this synthesis are the obvious differences in the masses of the photon and intermediate meson, and in their couplings. We might hope to understand these differences by imagining that the symmetries relating the weak and electromagnetic
interactions are exact symmetries of the Lagrangian but are broken by the vacuum. However, this raises the specter of unwanted massless Goldstone bosons. (J. Goldstone, Nuovo Cim. 19 (1961) 154) This note will describe a model in which the symmetry between the electromagnetic and weak interactions is spontaneously broken, but in which the Goldstone bosons are avoided by introducing the photon and the intermediate-boson fields as gauge fields. (J. Goldstone, A. Salam, and S. Weinberg, Phys.
Rev. 127 (1962) 965) The model may be renormalizable. (Extracted from the introductory part of the paper.).
Related references
See also
E. Fermi, Z. Phys. 88 (1934) 161;
R. P. Feynman and M. Gell-Mann, Phys. Rev. 109 (1958) 193;
J. Goldstone, Nuovo Cim. 19 (1961) 154;
J. Goldstone, A. Salam, and S. Weinberg, Phys. Rev. 127 (1962) 965;
P. W. Higgs, Phys. Lett. 12 (1964) 132;
P. W. Higgs, Phys. Rev. Lett. 13 (1964) 508;
P. W. Higgs, Phys. Rev. 145 (1966) 1156;
F. Englert and R. Brout, Phys. Rev. Lett. 13 (1964) 321;
G. S. Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, and T. W. B. Kibble, Phys. Rev. Lett. 13 (1964) 585;
T. W. B. Kibble, Phys. Rev. 155 (1967) 1554;
S. Weinberg, Phys. Rev. Lett. 18 (1967) 188;
S. Weinberg, Phys. Rev. Lett. 18 (1967) 507;
J. Schwinger, Phys. Lett. 24B (1967) 473;
S. L. Glashow, H. Schnitzer, and S. Weinberg, Phys. Rev. Lett. 19 (1967) 139;
T. D. Lee and C. N. Yang, Phys. Rev. 98 (1955) 101;
S. L. Glashow, Nucl. Phys. 22 (1961) 579;
