Electroweak interference confirmed

Before 1973, all observed weak interactions had involved charge exchange between the participating particles, implying that the carriers of the weak force were themselves always electrically charged. But if one is to unify the weak and electromagnetic interactions in a single gauge‐invariant framework, one requires a weak analog of the uncharged photon—an electrically neutral, weak, spin‐one boson. The discovery of the neutral‐current weak interactions at CERN in 1973 (for example, the elastic scattering of neutrinos off nucleons) was thus a crucial piece of evidence for the Weinberg–Salam–Glashow electroweak gauge theory—the scheme that has since come to be regarded as the “standard theory” for the unification of the electromagnetic and weak interactions. Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg (both then at Harvard) and Abdus Salam (Imperial College, London and International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste) shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work.

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