PREDICTION OF W AND Z BOSONS - THE NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS 1979

SALAM, A. & WARD, J. C.

Electromagnetic and Weak Interactions.

Amsterdam, North-Holland Publishing Company, 1964. Royal8vo. Bound in contemporary full cloth with gilt lettering to spine. In "Physics Letters", Vol. 13, 1964. Library stamp to upper part of pasted down front free end-paper. A very fine and clean copy. Pp. 168-171. [Entire volume: 368 pp.].

First printing of this seminal paper which provides a unified theory of weak and electromagnetic interactions. Their theory predicted the existence of new elementary particles, the W and Z bosons. These particles were found in experiments performed in 1983. For this work Salam shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 with Glashow and Weinberg.

"Beginning in the late 1950s, Salam's group at Imperial had become perhaps the most active of the groups working in gauge theories during a period in which quantum field theories had been displaced by another approach, the S-matrix model. While many theorists were looking toward this latter method in the hopes of avoiding the seemingly intractable difficulties that had begun to arise with field-theoretic calculations, Salam believed that a more "fundamental" explanation would have to come from invoking the standard perturbation method for quantum field theory. This conviction, shared by his collaborators at Imperial, was transmitted to his students. In 1964 the group started a research program on gauge theories. The aim of this program was to find the mathematical group of transformations that left "invariant" the laws that rule an interaction: The question was whether or not the interaction depended on certain physical properties of the particles, such as electric charge or other "quantum numbers."
The aim was to find symmetry groups that showed that interactions that seem essentially different are just manifestations of a more general one, such as in the electromagnetic theory, in which Salam's goal was to unify electromagnetic and weak interactions." (DSB)

Order-nr.: 47012