Researched
Standard Model of Particles
Quarks, leptons and three forces in one symmetry-based theory (1960s and 1970s), confirmed by collider experiments for 50 years.
Open in the interactive tree →Glashow, Weinberg and Salam unified the weak and electromagnetic forces (1967, Nobel Prize 1979), and quantum chromodynamics (1973) describes the strong force with quarks. The W and Z bosons (1983) and the top quark (1995) confirmed it. The model cannot explain gravity, dark matter, neutrino masses or the dominance of matter over antimatter.
Prerequisites
- Number Theory & Group Theory1801
- Theory of Relativity1905
- Noether's Theorem1918The Standard Model's gauge symmetries and conservation laws rest on Noether's theorem
- Quantum Mechanics1925
- Particle Accelerators1932Quarks and the W and Z bosons were found in accelerator experiments
- Nuclear Physics1938
- Quantum Electrodynamics1948The electroweak and strong theories reuse QED's field-theory methods
- CERN1954The W and Z bosons were discovered at CERN in 1983