The Electroweak Synthesis: A Narrative Review of Electroweak Unification and the Higgs Mechanism, from Glashow's Partial Symmetries to the LHC's Boson

Abstract

The electroweak synthesis is the Standard Model's spine: Sheldon Glashow's 1961 partial symmetries of the weak and electromagnetic interactions, Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg's gauge unification, and the symmetry breaking—Goldstone's 1961 theorem, Englert and Brout's, Higgs's, and Guralnik, Hagen, and Kibble's 1964 mechanisms—that gave the W and Z bosons their masses, the theory whose renormalizability 't Hooft's 1971 and 't Hooft and Veltman's 1972 papers proved, and whose Higgs boson the ATLAS and CMS collaborations observed in 2012. This article presents a narrative review of the primary literature of that synthesis, from Goldstone's 1961 field theories and the three 1964 breaking papers, through Glashow's 1961 partial symmetries, Salam and Ward's 1964, Weinberg's 1967 A Model of Leptons, Salam's 1968, 't Hooft's and 't Hooft and Veltman's renormalization, and the ATLAS's and CMS's 2012 observations. The synthesis is organized around three themes: the unification's construction, in which the weak and electromagnetic interactions shared one gauge group; the mass generation, in which spontaneous breaking hid the symmetry and weighted the bosons; and the renormalization's and observation's settlements, in which the theory became calculable and the boson became a discovery. It is concluded that the electroweak synthesis is the century's unification model—its mechanism predicted, its renormalizability proven, and its boson observed.