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A MODEL OF LEPTONS* Steven Weinberg† Laboratory for Nuclear Science and Physics Department, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts (Received 17 October 1967) Leptons interact only with photons, and with the intermediate bosons that presumably mediate weak interactions. What could be more natural than to unite these spin-one bosons into a multiplet of gauge fields? Standing in the way of this synthesis are the obvious differences in the masses of the photon and intermediate meson, and in their couplings. We might hope to understand these differences by imagining that the symmetries relating the weak and electromagnetic interactions are exact symmetries of the Lagrangian but are broken by the vacuum. However, this raises the specter of unwanted massless Goldstone bosons.This note will describe a model in which the symmetry between the electromagnetic and weak interactions is spontaneously broken, but in which the Goldstone bosons are avoided by introducing the photon and the intermediate-boson fields as gauge fields. The model may be renormalizable.

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A MODEL OF LEPTONS* Steven Weinberg† Laboratory for Nuclear Science and Physics Department, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts (Received 17 October 1967) Leptons interact only with photons, and with the intermediate bosons that presumably mediate weak interactions. What could be more natural than to unite these spin-one bosons into a multiplet of gauge fields? Standing in the way of this synthesis are the obvious differences in the masses of the photon and intermediate meson, and in their couplings. We might hope to understand these differences by imagining that the symmetries relating the weak and electromagnetic interactions are exact symmetries of the Lagrangian but are broken by the vacuum. However, this raises the specter of unwanted massless Goldstone bosons.This note will describe a model in which the symmetry between the electromagnetic and weak interactions is spontaneously broken, but in which the Goldstone bosons are avoided by introducing the photon and the intermediate-boson fields as gauge fields. The model may be renormalizable.
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Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 03-May-2023 14:57:37 UTC Robert McNees
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Weinberg submitted "A Model of Leptons" to Physical Review Letters in October of 1967. It describes a key component of the Standard Model, and is the most cited particle physics paper in inSPIRE.
His model describes a unified electroweak interaction at high energies. At low energies, spontaneously broken gauge symmetry gives mass to the W and Z bosons, while the photon remains massless. The result is a short range weak force and a long range electromagnetic interaction.
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.19.1264

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