A model of leptons, pp. 1264-66 in Physical Review Letters Vol. 19, No. 21, 20 November 1967. THE STANDARD MODEL: NOBEL PRIZE 1979

WEINBERG, Steven

Date d'édition : 1967

A propos de cet article

First edition, complete journal issue in original printed wrappers, of Steven Weinberg's model of the electroweak force, which predicted the existence of the Higgs boson. Weinberg's theory of the electroweak force has been confirmed experimentally, with the recent discovery of the Higgs boson by the Large Hadron Collider, and now is one of the essential elements of the "standard model" of particle physics. Weinberg's elegant paper is one of the most highly cited articles in high energy physics, with 7,807 citations (Stanford, Top Cited Articles of All Time, 2009). "Steven Weinberg, of the University of Texas at Austin, is considered by many to be the preeminent theoretical physicist alive in the world today" (American Philosophical Society, Benjamin Franklin Award). He shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with Abdus Salam (who had reached similar conclusions) for their "contribution to the theory of the unified and weak electromagnetic interaction". At Berkeley in 1967, "Weinberg produced a gauge theory that correctly predicted electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces. This was later to become known as the electroweak theory. In his paper, 'A model of leptons', he showed that although electromagnetism is much stronger than the weak force of everyday energies, the only way to devise a theory of the weak force is to include the electromagnetic force. Weinberg showed how what was seemingly impossible could be achieved and the forces could be unified through the interchange of particles in spite of the difference in their strengths. Abdus Salam had independently reached the same conclusions and what became known as the Weinberg-Salam model was a major advance on earlier models that had originally been applied to leptons. In 1979 Weinberg shared the Nobel Prize for Physics for this work with Salam and his old school friend Sheldon Glashow, who had extended the work that Weinberg and Salam had independently developed" (Chris Cooper, Physics, p. 99). The electroweak theory also predicted the existence of the Higgs boson, the particle that gives mass to other elementary particles. In July 2012 CERN announced that the Higgs had likely been discovered, and Weinberg wrote an op-ed for the New York Times on the history of the particle and his role in its discovery: "The illustrative models studied in most of the papers on symmetry breaking from 1960 to 1964 had introduced scalar fields to break the symmetries, and had typically found that some of these fields would show up as massive particles, bundles of the energy of the fields. Likewise, Salam and I in 1967-68 found that one of the four scalar fields we introduced to break the electroweak symmetry would appear as a new kind of electrically neutral unstable particle. This is the Higgs boson, which may now have been discovered, verifying the Standard Model's account of how the elementary particles get their masses." Complete journal issue, large 8vo (26.7 x 19.9cm), original printed wrappers.

N° de réf. du vendeur ABE-1659513857623

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: A model of leptons, pp. 1264-66 in Physical Review Letters Vol. 19, No. 21, 20 November 1967. THE STANDARD MODEL: NOBEL PRIZE 1979
• Date de parution: 1967
• Reliure: Soft cover
• Édition: 1st Edition
• État de l'article: Near Fine