The Standard Model of Particle Physics: European Review December 2014
The Standard Model of Particle Physics: European Review December 2014
The Standard Model of Particle Physics: European Review December 2014
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Abstract
This is a historical account from my personal perspective of the development over the last
few decades of the standard model of particle physics. The model is based on gauge theories,
of which the first was quantum electrodynamics, describing the interactions of electrons with
light. This was later incorporated into the electroweak theory, describing electromagnetic
and weak nuclear interactions. The standard model also includes quantum chromodynamics,
the theory of the strong nuclear interactions. The final capstone of the model was the Higgs
particle discovered in 2012 at CERN. But the model is very far from being the last word;
there are still many gaps in our understanding.
Key words: standard model of particle physics, gauge theory, electroweak theory, quantum
chromodynamics, Higgs boson
1
frequency f of the light by E = hf, where h is Planck’s constant. So whether light behaves as
a wave or a particle depends on what we choose to look at.
The same, we now know, is true of electrons and other particles; they exhibit wavelike
properties. They too produce interference fringes when passed through two parallel slits.
That is weird: if they are particles, then, one would imagine, they must pass through one slit
or the other. Yet if we arrange a device to observe which slit they go through the pattern
disappears. But though weird, the wave properties of electrons are now well understood and
indeed practically useful. The wavelengths involved are tiny, so if we want much finer
resolution than an ordinary optical microscope provides, we use an electron microscope.
And indeed to see detail on a sub-atomic scale we need even more energetic probes, which is
why we need big particle accelerators.
Curiously, Planck’s constant h turns up in another apparently unrelated setting. Most of
the known particles have an intrinsic spin, corresponding to an angular momentum which is
always an integral or half-integral multiple of h/2π, a quantity for which we use the special
symbol ℏ. There are two very different families of particles: bosons, whose spin is
0,,2, and fermions, with spin 12 , 23 , .
For simplicity we talk of “spin 0”, “spin ½”, “spin 1” and so on. Bosons are sociable and
like to occupy the same state, whereas fermions (including protons, neutrons and electrons)
are forbidden from doing so by the Pauli exclusion principle, the essential basis of atomic
structure.
Quantum electrodynamics
The standard model describes how these curious entities interact. The first piece of it to
reach a mature form was quantum electrodynamics (QED) which deals with the interactions
of light, or photons, with electrons. It is a field theory; each kind of particle is described by a
field extending through space. Photons of course are related to the electric and magnetic
fields, and there is also an electron field. Particles can be thought of as little wave packets,
short trains of waves in these fields, though the analogy is far from perfect.
QED was invented in the 1930s and gave good results, but also ran into a serious problem.
The standard method of calculation, called perturbation theory, involves successive
approximations. The first approximation gave results usually within a few percent of the
correct answer. The problem was that the higher approximations, intended to give more
accurate answers, actually gave the answer infinity! The solution to that problem emerged
just after the second world war. It was found independently by three people, in 1947 by
Richard Feynman and by Julian Schwinger in the USA and in fact earlier, in 1943, by Sin-
Itiro Tomonaga working all alone in wartime Japan. It was called renormalization theory.
Essentially it amounted to gathering all the infinities together into corrections to the mass and
electric charge of the electron. This juggling with infinite quantities still seems a rather
suspect procedure, but it works; after renormalization the results obtained were finite and
agreed to astonishing accuracy with the experiments. QED rapidly became the most
accurately verified theory in the history of physics.
So what next? By the time I had the good fortune to join Abdus Salam’s group at
Imperial College in 1959, QED was a well-established theory. But there are other forces
besides the electromagnetic, and physicists started searching for equally successful models of
those.
We distinguish four kinds of forces. Two of these, the electromagnetic and gravitational,
are familiar because they are long-range forces, diminishing as the inverse square of the
distance. In QED the electromagnetic force between two electrons can be thought of as due
to the exchange of photons between them. It is long-range because the photon is massless,
by which we mean it has no rest-mass. A massive particle with rest-mass m has a minimum
2
energy, when it is at rest, given by Einstein’s famous relation E = mc2. But a photon is never
at rest and its energy can be as small as one likes.
Gravitational forces are long-range too, supposedly transmitted by another massless
particle, the graviton. But on the scale of particle physics, gravitational forces are tiny; the
gravitational attraction between a pair of protons is weaker than the electrostatic repulsion by
a factor of a trillion trillion trillion. Gravitons are therefore at the moment (and perhaps for
ever) completely undetectable, though physicists hope to be able to detect gravitational
waves within the next few years.
Gauge theories
Where were we to look for theories of the strong and weak interactions? Some people
argued for abandoning field theory altogether and advocated an alternative, called S-matrix
theory. But Salam and others of like mind felt that the answer lay in a particular kind of field
theory, a gauge theory. QED is the simplest example of a gauge theory. That means it has a
particular type of symmetry, whose simplest manifestation is that it is differences in electric
voltages that matter, not absolute voltages.
3
The first gauge theory beyond QED was proposed in 1954 by Chen-Ning Yang and
Robert Mills, and incorporated Heisenberg’s isospin symmetry. The same theory was
actually written down independently by a student of Salam’s, Ronald Shaw, though he never
published it except as a Cambridge University PhD thesis. It was intended as a theory of
strong interactions. In the end it turned out not to be the correct theory, but it is nevertheless
the basis for all later work on gauge theories.
There were also proposals for a gauge theory of weak interactions, the first by Schwinger
in 1956. It had been discovered that just as electromagnetic processes proceed via exchange
of photons, so the weak interactions could be seen as mediated by particles called W+ and W–,
where the superscripts indicate positive and negative electric charge. In many ways these
particles were similar to the photon — in particular they all have spin 1 — but with one
major difference. To explain the extremely short range of the weak interactions it had to be
assumed that the W particles are very massive, in fact about 100 times heavier than a proton.
Schwinger suggested they might also be the “gauge bosons” of a gauge theory, and indeed
that there might be a unified theory of weak and electromagnetic interactions with the W+, W–
and photon (conventionally denoted by γ) appearing symmetrically. But of course this
symmetry could not be exact; because of the big difference in mass, it had to be severely
broken.
Other proposals followed. In 1961, Sheldon Glashow proposed a modified theory. To
solve another problem with Schwinger’s scheme, concerning mirror symmetry, he added a
fourth gauge boson, Z0, electrically neutral like the photon. Salam and his collaborator, John
Ward, proposed essentially the same theory in 1964, apparently unaware of Glashow’s work.
4
Richard Hagen, and myself at Imperial College. The three groups all published papers in
Physical Review Letters in the summer and autumn of 1964. They approached the problem
from very different perspectives, but came to essentially the same conclusion. There is
nothing wrong with the proof of the Goldstone theorem, but it relies on a very natural
assumption that is nevertheless false for gauge theories. The mechanism has been described
as one in which the gauge bosons “eat” the Nambu-Goldstone bosons and hence acquire
mass. The spontaneous symmetry breaking is achieved through the action of a new scalar
field, whose corresponding particles are the Higgs bosons. “Scalar” here means that the
Higgs bosons, uniquely among known elementary particles, have spin zero.
These three papers attracted almost no interest at the time. Although by then we had in
place both Glashow’s unified model and the mass-generating mechanism, it took three more
years for anyone to put the two together. I wrote another paper on the subject in 1967,
exploring the way the mechanism would apply to more realistic models, not just the simplest
gauge theory discussed in the 1964 papers. That work helped, I believe, to revive interest in
the problem, particularly Salam’s interest. Finally a unified theory of weak and
electromagnetic interactions, combining Glashow’s model with the mass-generating
mechanism, was proposed by Weinberg in late 1967. Salam developed essentially the same
theory independently, and presented it in lectures he gave at Imperial College in the autumn
of that year, but he did not publish it until the following year. He called it the “electroweak
theory”. Both he and Weinberg believed that the theory was indeed renormalizable and
therefore self-consistent, but this was only proved in 1971 in a remarkable tour de force by a
young student, Gerard ’t Hooft. The correctness of the model was confirmed over the next
twenty years by experiments at CERN and elsewhere, including the discovery of the W+, W–,
and Z0 particles in 1983.
5
Thus the three quarks in (uuu) are of three different colours and so don’t violate the Pauli
principle. There is perfect symmetry between the different colours.
We now know that there are in fact six types of quark, not just three. The three extra are
called “charm” (c), “bottom” (b) and “top” (t); more glamorous names for the last two,
“beauty” and “truth”, have not caught on. The six quarks can be arranged as three pairs,
(u,d), (c,s), (t,b), each with the same pair of charges ( + 2 3 e, − 1 3 e ). Each of the three pairs
looks essentially the same, except for the fact that they get increasingly heavy; the top quark
is actually heavier than the W and Z gauge bosons. The electron too has two very similar but
heavier companions, the muon (µ) and the tau (τ), and each of these three is paired with a
massless neutrino with charge zero. So for both the quarks and what we call the leptons there
is an odd three-generation structure.
Physicists took some time to be convinced that this apparently artificial solution is in fact
correct. But colour proved to be the essential key to understanding the strong interactions.
Han and Nambu suggested that strong interactions might be mediated by an octet of gauge
bosons, called “gluons”, coupled specifically to colours. This idea forms the basis of the now
accepted gauge theory of strong interactions, quantum chromodynamics (QCD). This colour
force induced by gluon exchange has some really odd features. Familiar forces like
electromagnetism always fall off with increasing distance. But in 1973 David Gross and
Frank Wilczek, and also David Politzer, showed that by contrast the colour force exhibits
what they called “asymptotic freedom”, namely it becomes very weak at short distances.
(“Asymptotic” here indicates that the effect is seen in collisions at very high energy.) This is
very fortunate for theorists, because it means that the usual perturbation-theory technique can
be used to calculate these high-energy effects. Why no one has seen any free quarks or
gluons is explained by the obverse of this phenomenon, called “confinement”, namely that
the colour force between particles that are not colour-neutral grows at large distance; it is as
if the quarks inside a proton or neutron are bound together by elastic threads and can never
escape.
6
we have no explanation. Why for both quarks and leptons are there three generations with
very similar properties but wildly varying masses? Why do quarks come in three colours?
One theory is that all these choices are random. There may have been many big bangs, each
producing a universe with its own set of parameters. Most of those universes would probably
be devoid of life. But that is for many a profoundly unsatisfactory answer; we certainly
hoped for a more predictive theory!
On the observational side, there are still many things we cannot explain. What is the
nature of the dark matter in the universe? Why does the universe contain more matter than
antimatter — leptons and quarks rather than antileptons and antiquarks? Moreover there are
a few points on which the standard model definitely does not agree with observation. In
particular, in the standard model the neutrinos are strictly massless. But we now know that
do in fact have non-zero, albeit very tiny, masses. We really have no idea why.
Finally, there is the elephant in the room: gravity, which does not appear at all in the
standard model. It is in fact very difficult to reconcile our best theory of gravity, Einstein’s
general theory of relativity, with quantum theory. That is a problem we have been struggling
with for the best part of a century. There are hopes that string theory, or its more modern
realization, M-theory, may successfully unite the two, but that effort has been going on for
decades without as yet reaching a conclusion. At any rate it does appear that there is a lot
more for theoretical physicists to do!
Further Reading
Sample, I. (2010) Massive: the Hunt for the God Particle (London: Virgin Books)
Close, F. (2011) The Infinity Puzzle (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Carroll, S. (2013) The Particle at the End of the Universe (London: One World Publications)
Acknowledgement
This article is the text of an invited talk given at the 25th Anniversary Meeting of the
Academia Europaea held in Wrocław in September 2013. I am grateful to the organizers for
the invitation.