1964 PRL symmetry breaking papers
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The 1964 ''PRL'' symmetry breaking papers were written by three teams who proposed related but different approaches to explain how mass could arise in local
gauge theories In physics, a gauge theory is a type of field theory in which the Lagrangian (and hence the dynamics of the system itself) does not change (is invariant) under local transformations according to certain smooth families of operations (Lie group ...
. These three papers were written by:
Robert Brout Robert Brout (; June 14, 1928 – May 3, 2011) was an American theoretical physicist who made significant contributions in elementary particle physics. He was a professor of physics at Université Libre de Bruxelles where he had created, together ...
and
François Englert François, Baron Englert (; born 6 November 1932) is a Belgian theoretical physicist and 2013 Nobel prize laureate. Englert is professor emeritus at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), where he is a member of the Service de Physique Thé ...
;
Peter Higgs Peter Ware Higgs (born 29 May 1929) is a British theoretical physicist, Emeritus Professor in the University of Edinburgh,Griggs, Jessica (Summer 2008The Missing Piece ''Edit'' the University of Edinburgh Alumni Magazine, p. 17 and Nobel Prize ...
; and
Gerald Guralnik Gerald Stanford "Gerry" Guralnik (; September 17, 1936 – April 26, 2014) was the Chancellor’s Professor of Physics at Brown University. In 1964 he co-discovered the Higgs mechanism and Higgs boson with C. R. Hagen and Tom Kibble (GHK). As par ...
, C. Richard Hagen, and
Tom Kibble Sir Thomas Walter Bannerman Kibble (; 23 December 1932 – 2 June 2016) was a British theoretical physicist, senior research investigator at the Blackett Laboratory and Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London. His ...
(GHK). They are credited with the theory of the
Higgs mechanism In the Standard Model of particle physics, the Higgs mechanism is essential to explain the generation mechanism of the property "mass" for gauge bosons. Without the Higgs mechanism, all bosons (one of the two classes of particles, the other be ...
and the prediction of the Higgs field and Higgs boson. Together, these provide a theoretical means by which
Goldstone's theorem In particle and condensed matter physics, Goldstone bosons or Nambu–Goldstone bosons (NGBs) are bosons that appear necessarily in models exhibiting spontaneous breakdown of continuous symmetries. They were discovered by Yoichiro Nambu in par ...
(a problematic limitation affecting early modern
particle physics Particle physics or high energy physics is the study of fundamental particles and forces that constitute matter and radiation. The fundamental particles in the universe are classified in the Standard Model as fermions (matter particles) an ...
theories) can be avoided. They show how
gauge bosons In particle physics, a gauge boson is a bosonic elementary particle that acts as the force carrier for elementary fermions. Elementary particles, whose interactions are described by a gauge theory, interact with each other by the exchange of gauge ...
can acquire non-zero masses as a result of
spontaneous symmetry breaking Spontaneous symmetry breaking is a spontaneous process of symmetry breaking, by which a physical system in a symmetric state spontaneously ends up in an asymmetric state. In particular, it can describe systems where the equations of motion or ...
within
gauge invariant In physics, a gauge theory is a type of field theory in which the Lagrangian (and hence the dynamics of the system itself) does not change (is invariant) under local transformations according to certain smooth families of operations (Lie group ...
models of the universe. As such, these form the key element of the
electroweak theory In particle physics, the electroweak interaction or electroweak force is the unified description of two of the four known fundamental interactions of nature: electromagnetism and the weak interaction. Although these two forces appear very differe ...
that forms part of the Standard Model of
particle physics Particle physics or high energy physics is the study of fundamental particles and forces that constitute matter and radiation. The fundamental particles in the universe are classified in the Standard Model as fermions (matter particles) an ...
, and of many models, such as the
Grand Unified Theory A Grand Unified Theory (GUT) is a model in particle physics in which, at high energies, the three gauge interactions of the Standard Model comprising the electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces are merged into a single force. Although this ...
, that go beyond it. The papers that introduce this mechanism were published in ''
Physical Review Letters ''Physical Review Letters'' (''PRL''), established in 1958, is a peer-reviewed, scientific journal that is published 52 times per year by the American Physical Society. As also confirmed by various measurement standards, which include the ''Journa ...
'' (''PRL'') and were each recognized as milestone papers by ''PRL''s 50th anniversary celebration. All of the six physicists were awarded the 2010 J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics for this work, and in 2013 Englert and Higgs received the Nobel Prize in Physics. On 4 July 2012, the two main experiments at the LHC (
ATLAS An atlas is a collection of maps; it is typically a bundle of maps of Earth or of a region of Earth. Atlases have traditionally been bound into book form, but today many atlases are in multimedia formats. In addition to presenting geograp ...
and CMS) both reported independently the confirmed existence of a previously unknown particle with a mass of about (about 133 proton masses, on the order of 10−25 kg), which is "consistent with the Higgs boson" and widely believed to be the Higgs boson.


Introduction

A gauge theory of
elementary particles In particle physics, an elementary particle or fundamental particle is a subatomic particle that is not composed of other particles. Particles currently thought to be elementary include electrons, the fundamental fermions (quarks, leptons, anti ...
is a very attractive potential framework for constructing the ultimate theory. Such a theory has the very desirable property of being potentially
renormalizable Renormalization is a collection of techniques in quantum field theory, the statistical mechanics of fields, and the theory of self-similar geometric structures, that are used to treat infinities arising in calculated quantities by altering va ...
—shorthand for saying that all calculational infinities encountered can be consistently absorbed into a few parameters of the theory. However, as soon as one gives mass to the gauge fields, renormalizability is lost, and the theory rendered useless.
Spontaneous symmetry breaking Spontaneous symmetry breaking is a spontaneous process of symmetry breaking, by which a physical system in a symmetric state spontaneously ends up in an asymmetric state. In particular, it can describe systems where the equations of motion or ...
is a promising mechanism, which could be used to give mass to the vector gauge particles. A significant difficulty which one encounters, however, is
Goldstone's theorem In particle and condensed matter physics, Goldstone bosons or Nambu–Goldstone bosons (NGBs) are bosons that appear necessarily in models exhibiting spontaneous breakdown of continuous symmetries. They were discovered by Yoichiro Nambu in par ...
, which states that in any quantum field theory which has a spontaneously broken symmetry there must occur a zero-mass particle. So the problem arises—how can one break a symmetry and at the same time not introduce unwanted zero-mass particles. The resolution of this dilemma lies in the observation that in the case of gauge theories, the Goldstone theorem can be avoided by working in the so-called
radiation gauge In the physics of gauge theories, gauge fixing (also called choosing a gauge) denotes a mathematical procedure for coping with redundant degrees of freedom in field variables. By definition, a gauge theory represents each physically distinct c ...
. This is because the proof of Goldstone's theorem requires manifest
Lorentz covariance In relativistic physics, Lorentz symmetry or Lorentz invariance, named after the Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz, is an equivalence of observation or observational symmetry due to special relativity implying that the laws of physics stay the same ...
, a property not possessed by the radiation gauge.


History

Particle physicists study
matter In classical physics and general chemistry, matter is any substance that has mass and takes up space by having volume. All everyday objects that can be touched are ultimately composed of atoms, which are made up of interacting subatomic part ...
made from
fundamental particle In particle physics, an elementary particle or fundamental particle is a subatomic particle that is not composed of other particles. Particles currently thought to be elementary include electrons, the fundamental fermions (quarks, leptons, antiqu ...
s whose interactions are mediated by exchange particles known as
force carrier In quantum field theory, a force carrier, also known as messenger particle or intermediate particle, is a type of particle that gives rise to forces between other particles. These particles serve as the quanta of a particular kind of physical fi ...
s. At the beginning of the 1960s a number of these particles had been discovered or proposed, along with theories suggesting how they relate to each other, some of which had already been reformulated as field theories in which the objects of study are not particles and forces, but
quantum field In theoretical physics, quantum field theory (QFT) is a theoretical framework that combines classical field theory, special relativity, and quantum mechanics. QFT is used in particle physics to construct physical models of subatomic particles ...
s and their symmetries. However, attempts to unify known
fundamental forces In physics, the fundamental interactions, also known as fundamental forces, are the interactions that do not appear to be reducible to more basic interactions. There are four fundamental interactions known to exist: the gravitational and electro ...
such as the
electromagnetic force In physics, electromagnetism is an interaction that occurs between particles with electric charge. It is the second-strongest of the four fundamental interactions, after the strong force, and it is the dominant force in the interactions o ...
and the
weak nuclear force In nuclear physics and particle physics, the weak interaction, which is also often called the weak force or weak nuclear force, is one of the four known fundamental interactions, with the others being electromagnetism, the strong interaction ...
were known to be incomplete. One known omission was that
gauge invariant In physics, a gauge theory is a type of field theory in which the Lagrangian (and hence the dynamics of the system itself) does not change (is invariant) under local transformations according to certain smooth families of operations (Lie group ...
approaches, including non-abelian models such as
Yang–Mills theory In mathematical physics, Yang–Mills theory is a gauge theory based on a special unitary group SU(''N''), or more generally any compact, reductive Lie algebra. Yang–Mills theory seeks to describe the behavior of elementary particles using ...
(1954), which held great promise for unified theories, also seemed to predict known massive particles as massless.
Goldstone's theorem In particle and condensed matter physics, Goldstone bosons or Nambu–Goldstone bosons (NGBs) are bosons that appear necessarily in models exhibiting spontaneous breakdown of continuous symmetries. They were discovered by Yoichiro Nambu in par ...
, relating to continuous symmetries within some theories, also appeared to rule out many obvious solutions, since it appeared to show that zero-mass particles would have to also exist that were "simply not seen". According to
Gerald Guralnik Gerald Stanford "Gerry" Guralnik (; September 17, 1936 – April 26, 2014) was the Chancellor’s Professor of Physics at Brown University. In 1964 he co-discovered the Higgs mechanism and Higgs boson with C. R. Hagen and Tom Kibble (GHK). As par ...
, physicists had "no understanding" how these problems could be overcome in 1964. In 2014, Guralnik and Carl Hagen wrote a paper that contended that even after 50 years there is still widespread misunderstanding, by
physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...
s and the
Nobel Committee A Nobel Committee is a working body responsible for most of the work involved in selecting Nobel Prize laureates. There are five Nobel Committees, one for each Nobel Prize. Four of these committees (for prizes in physics, chemistry, physiolo ...
, of the
Goldstone boson In particle and condensed matter physics, Goldstone bosons or Nambu–Goldstone bosons (NGBs) are bosons that appear necessarily in models exhibiting spontaneous breakdown of continuous symmetries. They were discovered by Yoichiro Nambu in par ...
role. This paper, published in ''
Modern Physics Letters A ''Modern Physics Letters A'' (MPLA) is the first in a series of journals published by World Scientific under the title ''Modern Physics Letters''. It covers specifically papers and research on gravitation, cosmology, nuclear physics, and particles ...
'', turned out to be Guralnik's last published work. Particle physicist and mathematician
Peter Woit Peter Woit (; born September 11, 1957) is an American theoretical physicist. He is a senior lecturer in the Mathematics department at Columbia University. Woit, a critic of string theory, has published a book ''Not Even Wrong'' (2006) and writ ...
summarised the state of research at the time: : "Yang and Mills work on non-abelian gauge theory had one huge problem: in
perturbation theory In mathematics and applied mathematics, perturbation theory comprises methods for finding an approximate solution to a problem, by starting from the exact solution of a related, simpler problem. A critical feature of the technique is a middl ...
it has massless particles which don't correspond to anything we see. One way of getting rid of this problem is now fairly well-understood, the phenomenon of confinement realized in QCD, where the strong interactions get rid of the massless "gluon" states at long distances. By the very early sixties, people had begun to understand another source of massless particles: spontaneous symmetry breaking of a continuous symmetry. What Philip Anderson realized and worked out in the summer of 1962 was that, when you have ''both'' gauge symmetry ''and'' spontaneous symmetry breaking, the Nambu–Goldstone massless mode can combine with the massless gauge field modes to produce a physical massive vector field. This is what happens in superconductivity, a subject about which Anderson was (and is) one of the leading experts." '' ext condensed' The
Higgs mechanism In the Standard Model of particle physics, the Higgs mechanism is essential to explain the generation mechanism of the property "mass" for gauge bosons. Without the Higgs mechanism, all bosons (one of the two classes of particles, the other be ...
is a process by which vector bosons can get
rest mass The invariant mass, rest mass, intrinsic mass, proper mass, or in the case of bound systems simply mass, is the portion of the total mass of an object or system of objects that is independent of the overall motion of the system. More precisely, i ...
''without'' explicitly breaking
gauge invariance In physics, a gauge theory is a type of field theory in which the Lagrangian (and hence the dynamics of the system itself) does not change (is invariant) under local transformations according to certain smooth families of operations (Lie group ...
, as a byproduct of
spontaneous symmetry breaking Spontaneous symmetry breaking is a spontaneous process of symmetry breaking, by which a physical system in a symmetric state spontaneously ends up in an asymmetric state. In particular, it can describe systems where the equations of motion or ...
. The mathematical theory behind spontaneous symmetry breaking was initially conceived and published within particle physics by
Yoichiro Nambu was a Japanese-American physicist and professor at the University of Chicago. Known for his contributions to the field of theoretical physics, he was awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2008 for the discovery in 1960 of the mechanism ...
in 1960,The Nobel Prize in Physics 2008
– official Nobel Prize website.
the concept that such a mechanism could offer a possible solution for the "mass problem" was originally suggested in 1962 by Philip Anderson, – the original 2001 paper can be found at: and Abraham Klein and Benjamin Lee showed in March 1964 that Goldstone's theorem could be avoided this way in at least some non-relativistic cases and speculated it might be possible in truly relativistic cases. These approaches were quickly developed into a full relativistic model, independently and almost simultaneously, by three groups of physicists: by
François Englert François, Baron Englert (; born 6 November 1932) is a Belgian theoretical physicist and 2013 Nobel prize laureate. Englert is professor emeritus at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), where he is a member of the Service de Physique Thé ...
and
Robert Brout Robert Brout (; June 14, 1928 – May 3, 2011) was an American theoretical physicist who made significant contributions in elementary particle physics. He was a professor of physics at Université Libre de Bruxelles where he had created, together ...
in August 1964; by
Peter Higgs Peter Ware Higgs (born 29 May 1929) is a British theoretical physicist, Emeritus Professor in the University of Edinburgh,Griggs, Jessica (Summer 2008The Missing Piece ''Edit'' the University of Edinburgh Alumni Magazine, p. 17 and Nobel Prize ...
in October 1964; and by
Gerald Guralnik Gerald Stanford "Gerry" Guralnik (; September 17, 1936 – April 26, 2014) was the Chancellor’s Professor of Physics at Brown University. In 1964 he co-discovered the Higgs mechanism and Higgs boson with C. R. Hagen and Tom Kibble (GHK). As par ...
, Carl Hagen, and
Tom Kibble Sir Thomas Walter Bannerman Kibble (; 23 December 1932 – 2 June 2016) was a British theoretical physicist, senior research investigator at the Blackett Laboratory and Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London. His ...
(GHK) in November 1964. Higgs also wrote a response published in September 1964 to an objection by Gilbert, which showed that if calculating within the radiation gauge, Goldstone's theorem and Gilbert's objection would become inapplicable.
Goldstone's theorem In particle and condensed matter physics, Goldstone bosons or Nambu–Goldstone bosons (NGBs) are bosons that appear necessarily in models exhibiting spontaneous breakdown of continuous symmetries. They were discovered by Yoichiro Nambu in par ...
only applies to gauges having manifest Lorentz covariance, a condition that took time to become questioned. But the process of quantisation requires a gauge to be fixed and at this point it becomes possible to choose a gauge such as the 'radiation' gauge which is not invariant over time, so that these problems can be avoided.
(Higgs later described Gilbert's objection as prompting his own paper.) Properties of the model were further considered by Guralnik in 1965, by Higgs in 1966, by Kibble in 1967, and further by GHK in 1967. The original three 1964 papers showed that when a gauge theory is combined with an additional field that spontaneously breaks the symmetry, the gauge bosons can consistently acquire a finite mass. In 1967,
Steven Weinberg Steven Weinberg (; May 3, 1933 – July 23, 2021) was an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in physics for his contributions with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow to the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interac ...
and
Abdus Salam Mohammad Abdus Salam Salam adopted the forename "Mohammad" in 1974 in response to the anti-Ahmadiyya decrees in Pakistan, similarly he grew his beard. (; ; 29 January 192621 November 1996) was a Punjabi Pakistani theoretical physicist and a ...
independently showed how a Higgs mechanism could be used to break the electroweak symmetry of
Sheldon Glashow Sheldon Lee Glashow (, ; born December 5, 1932) is a Nobel Prize-winning American theoretical physicist. He is the Metcalf Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Boston University and Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at Harvard U ...
's unified model for the weak and electromagnetic interactions (itself an extension of work by Schwinger), forming what became the Standard Model of particle physics. Weinberg was the first to observe that this would also provide mass terms for the fermions.   However, the seminal papers on spontaneous breaking of gauge symmetries were at first largely ignored, because it was widely believed that the (non-Abelian gauge) theories in question were a dead-end, and in particular that they could not be renormalised. In 1971–1972,
Martinus Veltman Martinus Justinus Godefriedus "Tini" Veltman (; 27 June 1931 – 4 January 2021) was a Dutch theoretical physicist. He shared the 1999 Nobel Prize in physics with his former PhD student Gerardus 't Hooft for their work on particle theory. Biogr ...
and
Gerard 't Hooft Gerardus (Gerard) 't Hooft (; born July 5, 1946) is a Dutch theoretical physicist and professor at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He shared the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics with his thesis advisor Martinus J. G. Veltman "for elucidating th ...
proved renormalisation of Yang–Mills was possible in two papers covering massless, and then massive, fields. Their contribution, and others' work on the
renormalization group In theoretical physics, the term renormalization group (RG) refers to a formal apparatus that allows systematic investigation of the changes of a physical system as viewed at different scales. In particle physics, it reflects the changes in the ...
, was eventually "enormously profound and influential", but even with all key elements of the eventual theory published there was still almost no wider interest. For example, Sidney Coleman found in a study that "essentially no-one paid any attention" to Weinberg's paper prior to 1971 – now the most cited in particle physicsLetters from the Past – A PRL Retrospective
(50 year celebration, 2008)
– and even in 1970 according to Politzer, Glashow's teaching of the weak interaction contained no mention of Weinberg's, Salam's, or Glashow's own work. In practice, Politzer states, almost everyone learned of the theory due to physicist Benjamin Lee, who combined the work of Veltman and 't Hooft with insights by others, and popularised the completed theory. In this way, from 1971, interest and acceptance "exploded"  and the ideas were quickly absorbed in the mainstream.


The significance of requiring manifest covariance

Most students who have taken a course in
electromagnetism In physics, electromagnetism is an interaction that occurs between particles with electric charge. It is the second-strongest of the four fundamental interactions, after the strong force, and it is the dominant force in the interactions of ...
have encountered the Coulomb potential. It basically states that two charged particles attract or repel each other by a force which varies according to the inverse square of their separation. This is fairly unambiguous for particles at rest, but if one or the other is following an arbitrary trajectory the question arises whether one should compute the force using the instantaneous positions of the particles or the so-called retarded positions. The latter recognizes that information cannot propagate instantaneously, rather it propagates at the
speed of light The speed of light in vacuum, commonly denoted , is a universal physical constant that is important in many areas of physics. The speed of light is exactly equal to ). According to the special theory of relativity, is the upper limit ...
. However, the
radiation gauge In the physics of gauge theories, gauge fixing (also called choosing a gauge) denotes a mathematical procedure for coping with redundant degrees of freedom in field variables. By definition, a gauge theory represents each physically distinct c ...
says that one uses the instantaneous positions of the particles, but doesn't violate causality because there are compensating terms in the force equation. In contrast, the Lorenz gauge imposes
manifest covariance In general relativity, a manifestly covariant equation is one in which all expressions are tensors. The operations of addition, tensor multiplication, tensor contraction, raising and lowering indices, and covariant differentiation may appear in ...
(and thus causality) at all stages of a calculation. Predictions of observable quantities are identical in the two gauges, but the radiation gauge formulation of quantum field theory avoids
Goldstone's theorem In particle and condensed matter physics, Goldstone bosons or Nambu–Goldstone bosons (NGBs) are bosons that appear necessarily in models exhibiting spontaneous breakdown of continuous symmetries. They were discovered by Yoichiro Nambu in par ...
.


Summary and impact of the ''PRL'' papers

The three papers written in 1964 were each recognised as milestone papers during ''
Physical Review Letters ''Physical Review Letters'' (''PRL''), established in 1958, is a peer-reviewed, scientific journal that is published 52 times per year by the American Physical Society. As also confirmed by various measurement standards, which include the ''Journa ...
'' 50th anniversary celebration. Their six authors were also awarded the 2010 J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics for this work. (A controversy also arose the same year, because in the event of a
Nobel Prize The Nobel Prizes ( ; sv, Nobelpriset ; no, Nobelprisen ) are five separate prizes that, according to Alfred Nobel's will of 1895, are awarded to "those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." Alfr ...
only up to three scientists could be recognised, with six being credited for the papers. ) Two of the three ''PRL'' papers (by Higgs and by GHK) contained equations for the hypothetical
field Field may refer to: Expanses of open ground * Field (agriculture), an area of land used for agricultural purposes * Airfield, an aerodrome that lacks the infrastructure of an airport * Battlefield * Lawn, an area of mowed grass * Meadow, a grass ...
that eventually would become known as the Higgs field and its hypothetical quantum, the Higgs boson. Higgs's subsequent 1966 paper showed the decay mechanism of the boson; only a massive boson can decay and the decays can prove the mechanism. Each of these papers is unique and demonstrates different approaches to showing how mass arise in gauge particles. Over the years, the differences between these papers are no longer widely understood, due to the passage of time and acceptance of end-results by the
particle physics Particle physics or high energy physics is the study of fundamental particles and forces that constitute matter and radiation. The fundamental particles in the universe are classified in the Standard Model as fermions (matter particles) an ...
community. A study of citation indices is interesting—more than 40 years after the 1964 publication in ''Physical Review Letters'' there is little noticeable pattern of preference among them, with the vast majority of researchers in the field mentioning all three milestone papers. In the paper by Higgs the boson is massive, and in a closing sentence Higgs writes that "an essential feature" of the theory "is the prediction of incomplete multiplets of scalar and vector bosons". ( Frank Close comments that 1960s gauge theorists were focused on the problem of massless ''vector'' bosons, and the implied existence of a massive ''scalar'' boson was not seen as important; only Higgs directly addressed it. ) In the paper by GHK the boson is massless and decoupled from the massive states. In reviews dated 2009 and 2011, Guralnik states that in the GHK model the boson is massless only in a lowest-order approximation, but it is not subject to any constraint and acquires mass at higher orders, and adds that the GHK paper was the only one to show that there are no massless
Goldstone boson In particle and condensed matter physics, Goldstone bosons or Nambu–Goldstone bosons (NGBs) are bosons that appear necessarily in models exhibiting spontaneous breakdown of continuous symmetries. They were discovered by Yoichiro Nambu in par ...
s in the model and to give a complete analysis of the general Higgs mechanism. All three reached similar conclusions, despite their very different approaches: Higgs' paper essentially used classical techniques, Englert and Brout's involved calculating vacuum polarization in perturbation theory around an assumed symmetry-breaking vacuum state, and GHK used operator formalism and conservation laws to explore in depth the ways in which Goldstone's theorem explicitly fails. In addition to explaining how mass is acquired by vector bosons, the Higgs mechanism also predicts the ratio between the W boson and Z boson masses as well as their couplings with each other and with the Standard Model quarks and leptons. Subsequently, many of these predictions have been verified by precise measurements performed at the LEP and the SLC colliders, thus overwhelmingly confirming that some kind of Higgs mechanism does take place in nature, but the exact manner by which it happens has not yet been discovered. The results of searching for the Higgs boson are expected to provide evidence about how this is realized in nature.


Consequences of the papers

The resulting electroweak theory and Standard Model have correctly predicted (among other discoveries) weak neutral currents, three bosons, the top and
charm quark The charm quark, charmed quark or c quark (from its symbol, c) is the third-most massive of all quarks, a type of elementary particle. Charm quarks are found in hadrons, which are subatomic particles made of quarks. Examples of hadrons containin ...
s, and with great precision, the mass and other properties of some of these.The success of the Higgs based electroweak theory and Standard Model is illustrated by their
predictions A prediction (Latin ''præ-'', "before," and ''dicere'', "to say"), or forecast, is a statement about a future event or data. They are often, but not always, based upon experience or knowledge. There is no universal agreement about the exact ...
of the mass of two particles later detected: the W boson (predicted mass: , experimental measurement: ), and the Z boson (predicted mass: , experimental measurement: ). The existence of the Z boson was itself another prediction. Other correct predictions included the weak neutral current, the gluon, and the top and
charm quark The charm quark, charmed quark or c quark (from its symbol, c) is the third-most massive of all quarks, a type of elementary particle. Charm quarks are found in hadrons, which are subatomic particles made of quarks. Examples of hadrons containin ...
s, all later proven to exist as the theory said.
Many of those involved eventually won
Nobel Prize The Nobel Prizes ( ; sv, Nobelpriset ; no, Nobelprisen ) are five separate prizes that, according to Alfred Nobel's will of 1895, are awarded to "those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." Alfr ...
s or other renowned awards. A 1974 paper in ''
Reviews of Modern Physics ''Reviews of Modern Physics'' (abbreviated RMP) is a quarterly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the American Physical Society. It was established in 1929 and the current editor-in-chief is Michael Thoennessen. The journal publishes r ...
'' commented that "while no one doubted the athematicalcorrectness of these arguments, no one quite believed that nature was diabolically clever enough to take advantage of them". By 1986 and again in the 1990s it became possible to write that understanding and proving the Higgs sector of the Standard Model was "the central problem today in particle physics."  – quoted as being in the first (1990) edition of the book by Peter Higgs in his talk "My Life as a Boson", 2001, ref#25.


See also


Notes


References


Further reading

* * * * * *


External links


The Hunt for the Higgs at TevatronCERN Courier Letter from GHK – December 2008

In CERN Courier, Steven Weinberg reflects on spontaneous symmetry breakingBlog Not Even Wrong, Review of Massive by Ian SampleBlog Not Even Wrong, Anderson-Higgs MechanismIan Sample on Controversy and Nobel Reform
{{DEFAULTSORT:1964 Prl Symmetry Breaking Papers PRL symmetry breaking papers Physics papers Works originally published in American magazines 1964 documents Works originally published in science and technology magazines Standard Model