Gauge theories and the standard model

Abstract

A possible goal of fundamental physics is to reduce all natural phenomena to a set of basic laws and theories which, at least in principle, can quantitatively reproduce and predict experimental observations. At the microscopic level all the phenomenology of matter and radiation, including molecular, atomic, nuclear, and subnuclear physics, can be understood in terms of three classes of fundamental interactions: strong, electromagnetic, and weak interactions. For all material bodies on the Earth and in all geological, astrophysical, and cosmological phenomena, a fourth interaction, the gravitational force, plays a dominant role, but this remains negligible in atomic and nuclear physics. In atoms, the electrons are bound to nuclei by electromagnetic forces, and the properties of electron clouds explain the complex phenomenology of atoms and molecules. Light is a particular vibration of electric and magnetic fields (an electromagnetic wave). Strong interactions bind the protons and neutrons together in nuclei, being so strongly attractive at short distances that they prevail over the electric repulsion due to the like charges of protons. Protons and neutrons, in turn, are composites of three quarks held together by strong interactions occur between quarks and gluons (hence these particles are called “hadrons” from the Greek word for “strong”). The weak interactions are responsible for the beta radioactivity that makes some nuclei unstable, as well as the nuclear reactions that produce the enormous energy radiated by the stars, and in particular by our Sun. The weak interactions also cause the disintegration of the neutron, the charged pions, and the lightest hadronic particles with strangeness, charm, and beauty (which are “flavour” quantum numbers), as well as the decay of the top quark and the heavy charged leptons (the muon μ− and the tau τ−). In addition, all observed neutrino interactions are due to these weak forces.