50 years since iconic ‘A Model of Leptons’...
50 years since iconic ‘A Model of Leptons’ published
A model of leptons - PDF
S Weinberg - Physical review letters, 1967 - APS
Just two pages long, Weinberg’s elegant and simply written theory was revolutionary at the time, yet was virtually ignored for many years. But now, it is cited at least three times a week.
Image caption: “This event shows the real tracks produced in the 1200 litre Gargamelle bubble chamber that provided the first confirmation of a neutral current interaction.“
One day, as the 34-year-old Weinberg was driving his red Camero to work, he had a flash of insight – he had been looking for massless particles in the wrong place. He applied his theory to a rarely mentioned and often disregarded particle, the massive W boson, and paired it with a massless photon. Theorists accounted for the mass of the W by introducing another unseen mechanism. This later became known as the Higgs mechanism, which calls for the existence of a Higgs boson.