Electroweak Theory

The discovery of the electroweak theory crowned long years of investigation on weak interactions. The key earlier developments included Fermi’s phenomenological four-fermion interactions for the beta decay, discovery of parity violation and establishment of V − A structure of the weak currents, the Feynman-Gell-Mann CVC (conserved vector current) hypothesis, current algebra and its beautiful applications in the sixties, Cabibbo mixing and lepton-hadron universality, and finally, the proposal of intermediate vector bosons (IVB) to mitigate the high-energy behavior of the pointlike Fermi’s interaction theory.