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In particle physics, the electroweak interaction is the unified description of two of the four known fundamental interactions of nature: electromagnetism and the weak interaction. Although these two forces appear very different at everyday low energies, the theory models them as two different aspects of the same force. Above the unification energy, on the order of 100 GeV, they would merge into a single electroweak force. Thus, if the universe is hot enough (approximately 1015 K, a temperature exceeded until shortly after the Big Bang), then the electromagnetic force and weak force merge into a combined electroweak force. During the electroweak epoch, the electroweak force separated from the strong force. During the quark epoch, the electroweak force split into the electromagnetic and weak force. Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam, and Steven Weinberg were awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for their contributions to the unification of the weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles.〔 〕〔 (【引用サイトリンク】title=The Nobel Prize in Physics 1979 )〕 The existence of the electroweak interactions was experimentally established in two stages, the first being the discovery of neutral currents in neutrino scattering by the Gargamelle collaboration in 1973, and the second in 1983 by the UA1 and the UA2 collaborations that involved the discovery of the W and Z gauge bosons in proton–antiproton collisions at the converted Super Proton Synchrotron. In 1999, Gerardus 't Hooft and Martinus Veltman were awarded the Nobel prize for showing that the electroweak theory is renormalizable. ==Formulation== Mathematically, the unification is accomplished under an ''SU''(2) × ''U''(1) gauge group. The corresponding gauge bosons are the three W bosons of weak isospin from SU(2) (W1, W2, and W3, and the B boson of weak hypercharge from U(1), respectively, all of which are massless. In the Standard Model, the , and the photon, are produced by the spontaneous symmetry breaking of the electroweak symmetry from ''SU''(2) × ''U''(1)''Y'' to ''U''(1)em, caused by the Higgs mechanism (see also Higgs boson).〔 〕〔 〕〔 〕〔 〕 ''U''(1)''Y'' and ''U''(1)em are different copies of ''U''(1); the generator of ''U''(1)em is given by ''Q'' = ''Y''/2 + ''I''3, where ''Y'' is the generator of ''U''(1)''Y'' (called the weak hypercharge), and ''I''3 is one of the ''SU''(2) generators (a component of weak isospin). The spontaneous symmetry breaking causes the W3 and B bosons to coalesce together into two different bosons – the boson, and the photon (γ) as follows: : Where θW is the ''weak mixing angle''. The axes representing the particles have essentially just been rotated, in the (W3, B) plane, by the angle θW. This also introduces a discrepancy between the mass of the and the mass of the particles (denoted as MZ and MW, respectively); : W1 and W2 bosons, in turn, combine to give massive charged bosons :. The distinction between electromagnetism and the weak force arises because there is a (nontrivial) linear combination of ''Y'' and ''I''3 that vanishes for the Higgs boson (it is an eigenstate of both ''Y'' and ''I''3, so the coefficients may be taken as −''I''3 and ''Y''): ''U''(1)em is defined to be the group generated by this linear combination, and is unbroken because it does not interact with the Higgs. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Electroweak interaction」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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