Steven Weinberg and Higgs physics
Metadata
Show full item recordEditorial
Elsevier
Date
2024-04-18Referencia bibliográfica
Djouadi, Abdelhak and Illana, José Ignacio. Steven Weinberg and Higgs physics. Nucl. Phys. B 1004 (2024) 116541 [10.1016/j.nuclphysb.2024.116541]
Sponsorship
Junta de Andalucía through the Talentia Senior program and the grant PID2021-128396NB-I00; Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities under the grant PID2022-140440NB-C21Abstract
As a tribute to Steven Weinberg, we summarize the immense impact that he had on the
understanding of the mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking and on the physics of the
Higgs boson. In particular, four landmark contributions to this field are highlighted. A first one
is his early work with Goldstone and Salam on spontaneously broken continuous symmetries
that paved the way to the Higgs mechanism. A second towering breakthrough is his model of
leptons which later became the Standard Model of particle physics and for which he was awarded
the Nobel prize with Glashow and Salam. A third seminal work is the so-called Weinberg-Linde
lower bound on the Higgs boson mass that was derived from the requirement of the stability of
the electroweak vacuum. Finally, we summarize his important contributions in model-building
of new physics with extended Higgs sectors and their possible impact in flavor physics and CP-violation.
The historical aspects as well as the contemporary way of viewing these four major
topics are summarized and their impact on today Higgs physics, and more generally particle
physics, is highlighted.