Lecture

Electroweak Unification and the W and Z Bosons

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In course

PHYS-416: Particle physics II

This course aims to make students familiar and comfortable with the main concepts of particle physics, providing a clear connection between the theory and relevant experimental results, including the most recent ones from modern particle physics experiment ...

Description

This lecture covers the energy frontier for discoveries of known elementary particles, focusing on bosons and fermions. It delves into the guidance for discoveries of the W and Z bosons, the top quark, and the Higgs boson, including their properties and decays. The lecture also explores the polarization states of bosons, the weak interaction, and the electroweak unification, detailing the SU(2)L symmetry, weak isospin, and weak hypercharge. Additionally, it discusses the Z boson, its decay modes, branching ratios, and the unification of electromagnetic and weak interactions within the standard model.

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Instructor

Lesya Shchutska

Current Work Our research is focused on testing the boundaries of the Standard Model of particle physics and on looking for new phenomena which might explain unanswered puzzles in the fundamental description of the Universe. The examples of such puzzles would be dark matter nature, matter-antimatter asymmetry of the Universe or very small but non-zero neutrino masses.The main instrument for these tasks is the LHCb detector at CERN, where the analyses of the data collected in the LHC proton-proton collisions

Official source

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Physics

Particle physics: Standard Model

Related concepts (32)

Weak interaction

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, and gravitation. It is the mechanism of interaction between subatomic particles that is responsible for the radioactive decay of atoms: The weak interaction participates in nuclear fission and nuclear fusion.

Higgs boson

The Higgs boson, sometimes called the Higgs particle, is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics produced by the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, one of the fields in particle physics theory. In the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a massive scalar boson with zero spin, even (positive) parity, no electric charge, and no colour charge that couples to (interacts with) mass. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately upon generation.

Gauge boson

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 bosons, usually as virtual particles. Photons, W and Z bosons, and gluons are gauge bosons. All known gauge bosons have a spin of 1; for comparison, the Higgs boson has spin zero and the hypothetical graviton has a spin of 2. Therefore, all known gauge bosons are vector bosons.

W and Z bosons

In particle physics, the W and Z bosons are vector bosons that are together known as the weak bosons or more generally as the intermediate vector bosons. These elementary particles mediate the weak interaction; the respective symbols are _W boson+, _W boson-, and _Z boson0. The _W boson+- bosons have either a positive or negative electric charge of 1 elementary charge and are each other's antiparticles. The _Z boson0 boson is electrically neutral and is its own antiparticle. The three particles each have a spin of 1.

Electroweak interaction

In particle physics, the electroweak interaction or electroweak force is the unified description of two of the four known fundamental interactions of nature: electromagnetism (electromagnetic interaction) and the weak interaction. Although these two forces appear very different at everyday low energies, the theory models them as two different aspects of the same force. Above the unification energy, on the order of 246 GeV, they would merge into a single force.

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