How many bosons mediate the weak interaction

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About this free course 5 hours study. Level 1: Introductory. Course rewards. The discovery of the W and Z particles themselves had to wait for the construction of a particle accelerator powerful enough to produce them. The first such machine that became available was the Super Proton Synchrotron, where unambiguous signals of W particles were seen in January during a series of experiments conducted by Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer.

The actual experiments were called UA1 led by Rubbia and UA2, and were the collaborative effort of many people. Van der Meer was the driving force on the accelerator end stochastic cooling.

Rubbia and van der Meer were promptly awarded the Nobel Prize in physics, a most unusual step for the conservative Nobel Foundation. Category : Bosons. Read what you need to know about our industry portal chemeurope. My watch list my. My watch list My saved searches My saved topics My newsletter Register free of charge. Keep logged in. Cookies deactivated. To use all functions of this page, please activate cookies in your browser.

Login Register. Additional recommended knowledge. Topics A-Z. All topics. To top. About chemeurope. Colorimetry-Software Day Free Trial. Your browser is not current. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. Your browser does not support JavaScript. Enrico Fermi was the first to put forth a theory of the weak force in , but it was not until the s that Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg developed the theory in its present form, when they proposed that the weak and electromagnetic forces are actually different manifestations of one electroweak force.

By emitting an electrically charged W boson, the weak force can cause a particle such as the proton to change its charge by changing the flavour of its quarks. In , Sidney Bludman suggested that there might be another arm of the weak force, the so-called "weak neutral current," mediated by an uncharged partner of the W bosons, which later became known as the Z boson.

Physicists working with the Gargamelle bubble chamber experiment at CERN presented the first convincing evidence to support this idea in Neutrinos are particles that interact only via the weak interaction, and when the physicists shot neutrinos through the bubble chamber they were able to detect evidence of the weak neutral current, and hence indirect evidence for the Z boson.