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28 - Panel Session: Spontaneous Breaking of Symmetry
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- By Laurie M. Brown, Born Brooklyn, New York, 1923; Ph.D., 1951 (physics), Cornell University; Professor Emeritus of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern University; high-energy physics (theory) and history of physics., Robert Brout, Born New York City, 1928; Ph.D., 1953 (physics), Columbia University; Professor of Physics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles; statistical mechanics and high-energy physics (theory)., Tian Yu Cao, Born Shanghai, China, 1941; Ph.D., 1987 (history and philosophy of science), University of Cambridge; Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Boston University; history and philosophy of science., Peter Higgs, Born Newcastle-upon-Tyne, United Kingdom, 1929; Ph.D., 1954 (physics), King's College, London; Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Edinburgh; high-energy physics (theory)., Yoichiro Nambu, Born Tokyo, Japan, 1921; Sc.D., 1952 (theoretical physics), University of Tokyo; Professor Emeritus of Physics, Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago; high-energy physics (theory).
- Edited by Lillian Hoddeson, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Laurie Brown, Northwestern University, Illinois, Michael Riordan, Stanford University, California, Max Dresden, Stanford University, California
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- Book:
- The Rise of the Standard Model
- Published online:
- 03 February 2010
- Print publication:
- 13 November 1997, pp 478-522
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
This panel was intended to function as a discussion, but instead it emerged as a series of short presentations by the participants Robert Brout, Tian Yu Cao, and Peter Higgs, with an introductory discussion by the chair. The present chapter consists of a revised and edited version of those reports and also includes a later submission by Yoichiro Nambu, who was scheduled to be on the panel originally but was unable to attend.
Introduction
The two sectors of the current Standard Model of particle physics, the strong color and the electroweak sectors, are distinct and are tied together only by ontology. Together, they describe the interactions, other than gravitation, of the three generations of quarks and leptons. The dream of representing the strong and weak “nuclear” interactions (as they were known before the acceptance of the quarks) as quantum field theories (QFT) goes back to the 1930s. The first such QFT, other than quantum electrodynamics, was Enrico Fermi's weak-interaction theory of 1934. This theory was almost immediately extended by Werner Heisenberg in 1935 to include the strong interactions (thus making it the first unified QFT) whose exchanged “quanta” were those of the electron-neutrino “Fermi-field.” In 1935, Hideki Yukawa invented “U-quanta,” now called pions, to represent the field of strong interactions, adjusting their mass to fit the range of nuclear forces. This was again a unified QFT, as the U-quanta were also intended to serve as intermediate bosons of the weak interaction.
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