Introduction

It is more than a century since the discovery by J. J. Thomson of the electron. The electron is still thought to be a structureless point particle, and one of the elementary particles of Nature. Other particles that were subsequently discovered and at first thought to be elementary, like the proton and the neutron, have since been found to have a complex structure.

What then are the ultimate constituents of matter? How are they categorised? How do they interact with each other? What, indeed, should we ask of a mathematical theory of elementary particles? Since the discovery of the electron, and more particularly in the last sixty years, there has been an immense amount of experimental and theoretical effort to determine answers to these questions. The present Standard Model of particle physics stems from that effort.

The Standard Model asserts that the material in the Universe is made up of elementary fermions interacting through fields, of which they are the sources. The particles associated with the interaction fields are bosons.

Four types of interaction field, set out in Table 1.1., have been distinguished in Nature. On the scales of particle physics, gravitational forces are insignificant. The Standard Model excludes from consideration the gravitational field. The quanta of the electromagnetic interaction field between electrically charged fermions are the massless photons. The quanta of the weak interaction fields between fermions are the charged W+ and W− bosons and the neutral Z boson, discovered at CERN in 1983.