Gauge theories of weak interactions II

M. A. B. & A. SIRLIN. BÉG

This article is a sequel to “Gauge Theories of Weak Interactions (Circa 1973-74)”, published in the Annual Review of Nuclear Science. Our purpose is to survey the state of the art eight years after; we have spared no effort, however, to make this article self-contained, comprehensible with only an occasional reference to the previous review. The tone of our presentation is set, and the scope of the discussion is delineated, by introductory remarks which emphasize some open questions in the field. We then proceed to examine the known structure of weak interactions in the light of the theory – now established, at least as a consistent description of electroweak effects in the low-energy domain – associated with the names of Glashow, Salam and Weinberg and commonly referred to as Quantum Flavordynamics (QFD). Here, as well as later in the paper, we try to recapture the spirit of some of the original contributions by using judiciously-defined parameters which afford a model-independent perspective of the experimental data, particularly in situations where we suspect that theoretical fine structure may be hidden in the errors.