Gaillard (centre), her granddaughter Cleo (left), and John Ellis (right), in 2019, during the celebration of Mary’s 80th birthday. From then on, particle physics had to test the standard theory." – Luciano Maiani The neutral-current signals changed that. Former CERN Director-General Luciano Maiani, quoted in a 2013 CERN Courier article, puts it this way: "At the start of the decade, people did not generally believe in a standard theory, even though theory had done everything.
The neutral-current discovery convinced physicists that the nascent Standard Model was on the right track.
This first experimental support for the unification of the electromagnetic and weak interactions attracted great interest and close scrutiny, but was generally accepted within a few months. This breakthrough was given broad publicity in an influential talk by Benjamin Lee of Fermilab during the ICHEP conference held there in 1972, in which he talked at length about “Higgs fields”.Įncouraged, in particular, by the CERN theorists Jacques Prentki and Bruno Zumino, the Gargamelle collaboration prioritised the search for weak neutral current interactions in the CERN neutrino beam, and their representative Paul Musset presented the first direct evidence for them in a seminar at CERN on 19 July 1973. All that changed, however, in 19 when, in Utrecht, Gerard ’t Hooft and Martinus Veltman (a former CERN staff member) proved that gauge theories employing the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism to generate masses for gauge bosons are renormalisable, and hence are mathematically consistent and can be used to make reliable, precise calculations for the weak interactions. In the 1960s, there were remarkably few citations of the papers by Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg on the theory of unified weak and electromagnetic interactions. Gargamelle provided the first direct evidence for the existence of neutral currents in 1973. Paul Musset (centre), then representative of the Gargamelle collaboration, standing in the control room of the eponymous bubble chamber in 1974. As the various breakthroughs of the decade gradually consolidated this theoretical framework, the Brout–Englert–Higgs (BEH) field and its boson emerged as the most promising theoretical model to explain the origin of mass.
At the dawn of the 1970s, the idea of a massive scalar boson as the keystone of a unified theoretical model of the weak and electromagnetic interactions had yet to become anchored in a field that was still learning to live with what we now know as the Standard Model of Particle Physics.
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