nLab electroweak field

Contents

matter field fermions (spinors, Dirac fields)

flavors of fundamental fermions in the standard model of particle physics:
generation of fermions	1st generation	2nd generation	3d generation
quarks ( $q$ )
up-type	up quark ( $u$ )	charm quark ( $c$ )	top quark ( $t$ )
down-type	down quark ( $d$ )	strange quark ( $s$ )	bottom quark ( $b$ )
leptons
charged	electron	muon	tauon
neutral	electron neutrino	muon neutrino	tau neutrino

bound states:
mesons	light mesons: pion ( $u d$ ) ρ-meson ( $u d$ ) ω-meson ( $u d$ ) f1-meson a1-meson	strange-mesons: ϕ-meson ( $s \bar s$ ), kaon, K-meson ( $u s$ , $d s$ ) eta-meson ( $u u + d d + s s$ ) charmed heavy mesons*: D-meson ( $u c$ , $d c$ , $s c$ ) J/ψ-meson ( $c \bar c$ )	bottom heavy mesons: B-meson ( $q b$ ) ϒ-meson ( $b \bar b$ )
baryons	nucleons: proton $(u u d)$ neutron $(u d d)$

hadrons (bound states of the above quarks)

bosinos:

dark matter candidates

Exotica

auxiliary fields

Idea

The standard model of particle physics is a Yang-Mills gauge theory with gauge group (a discrete quotient of) $SU(3) \times SU(2) \times U(1)$ . Here the first factor is the gauge group of QCD while the $(SU(2) \times U(1))$ -gauge field is that transmitting what is called the electroweak force.

The name is due to the fact that this gauge field unifies the electromagnetic field and that transmitting the weak nuclear force: the Higgs mechanism induces a spontaneous symmetry breaking of the electroweak field to these two fields. See at electroweak symmetry breaking.

The electroweak interaction was introduced in:

Sheldon Glashow, The renormalizability of vector meson interactions, Nucl. Phys. 10 (1959) 107-117 [doi:10.1016/0029-5582(59)90196-8]
Abdus Salam, John Clive Ward, Weak and electromagnetic interactions, Nuovo Cimento. 11 4 (1959) 568–577 [doi:10.1007/BF02726525]
Sheldon Glashow, Partial-symmetries of weak interactions, Nuclear Physics 22 4 (1961) 579-588 [doi:10.1016/0029-5582(61)90469-2]
Steven Weinberg, A model of Leptons, Phys. Rev. Lett. 19 (1967) 1264 [doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.19.1264]

The history of Weinberg 67 is recounted in:

Steven Weinberg, The Red Camaro, in George (1997), reprinted in: Steven Weinberg: Facing Up: Science and its Cultural Adversaries, Harvard University Press (2001) [pdf, pdf, ISBN:9780674011205]
Frank Close, Birth of a Symmetry, Cern Courier, Oct 13 2017

Textbook account:

Robert E. Marshak, Chapter 6 of: Conceptual Foundations of Modern Particle Physics, World Scientific 1993 (doi:10.1142/1767)