W Boson

Why in News?

• Recent findings on the most precise measurement of the W Boson mass ever made have stunned scientists, as it could potentially rewrite particle physics

About

• Discovered in 1983, the W boson is a fundamental particle

• Together with the Z boson, it is responsible for the weak force, one of four fundamental forces that govern the behavior of matter in our universe. Particles of matter interact by exchanging these bosons, but only over short distances

• The W boson, which is electrically charged, changes the very makeup of particles

• It switches protons into neutrons, and vice versa, through the weak force, triggering nuclear fusion and letting stars burn

• This burning also creates heavier elements and, when a star dies, those elements are tossed into space as the building blocks for planets and even people

• The weak force was combined with the electromagnetic force in theories of a unified electroweak force in the 1960s, in an effort to make the basic physics mathematically consistent

• But the theory called for the force-carrying particles to be massless, even though scientists knew the theoretical W boson had to be heavy to account for its short range

• Theorists accounted for the mass of the W by introducing another unseen mechanism

• This became known as the Higgs mechanism, which calls for the existence of a Higgs boson

• Both W and Z bosons are carriers of the weak nuclear force, and they are formed through radioactive processes

• The collider at CDF smashed trillions of protons and antiprotons (antimatter doubles to protons, carrying the same mass but opposite charge) into each other at high velocities as one such process, which produces a W-Boson once every 10-million collisions