
What is the main result of the recent experiment? What is the discrepancy they obtained? Thus, the W boson facilitates the interactions that make the sun burn and produce energy. This is what happens in beta decay, a radioactive interaction that takes place in the sun. By exchanging such W bosons, a neutron can change into a proton, for example. Unlike the photon, which is electrically neutral, the W-plus and W-minus are both massive and charged. Unlike the photon, which is massless, the W bosons are quite massive, which results in the force they mediate - the weak force - being very short ranged. The W boson was first seen in 1983 at CERN, located in the Franco-Swiss border. They were given the Nobel prize for their efforts in 1979. Inspired by the success of quantum electrodynamics, in the sixties, Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg developed the similar but more general, ‘electroweak’, theory in which they predicted these three particles and how they mediated the weak interactions. The gauge bosons associated with weak interactions are the W and Z bosons. Each symmetry is associated with a gauge boson.įor example, the gauge boson associated with electromagnetic interactions is the photon. The symmetries of the standard model are known as gauge symmetries, as they are generated by “gauge transformations” which are a set of continuous transformations (like rotation is a continuous transformation). How are the symmetries related to particles?

So far these have been detected only through their gravitational pull on surrounding matter. The other gap in the standard model is that it does not include a description of dark matter particles. So, in the grand plan of unifying all forces so that a single equation would describe all the interactions of matter, the standard model was found to be lacking. The standard model is thought to be incomplete because it gives a unified picture of only three of the four fundamental forces of nature - electromagnetic, weak nuclear, strong nuclear and gravitational interactions - it totally omits gravity. Why is the standard model believed to be incomplete? The particles predicted by the model, such as the Z boson, have been seen in experiments and the last to be discovered, in 2012, was the Higgs boson which gives mass to the heavy particles. According to this model there are a finite number of fundamental particles which are represented by the characteristic “eigen” states of these groups. These are mathematical groups generated by continuous transformations from, say, one particle to another. It is a description that views the elementary particles of the world as being connected by mathematical symmetries, just as an object and its mirror image are connected by a bilateral (left–right) symmetry.

The standard model of elementary particles is a theoretical construct in physics that describes particles of matter and their interaction. What is the standard model of elementary particle physics? Hence, physicists are looking for corroboration from other, independent, future experiments.

This is a major claim, since the standard model has been extraordinarily successful in the past decades. This result is highly significant because this implies the incompleteness of the standard model description. They stated that this precisely determined value did not match with what was expected from estimates using the standard model of particle physics. The story so far: On April 7, researchers from Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) Collaboration, in the U.S., announced, through a paper in Science, that they have made a precise measurement of the mass of the so-called W boson.
