In particle physics, the W and Z bosons are vector bosons that are together known as the weak bosons or more generally as the intermediate vector bosons. These elementary particles mediate the weak interaction; the respective symbols are , , and . The bosons have either a positive or negative electric charge of 1 elementary charge and are each other's antiparticles. The boson is electrically neutral and is its own antiparticle. The three particles each have a spin of 1. The bosons have a magnetic moment, but the has none. All three of these particles are very short-lived, with a half-life of about . Their experimental discovery was pivotal in establishing what is now called the Standard Model of particle physics.
The bosons are named after the weak force. The physicist Steven Weinberg named the additional particle the " particle", — The electroweak unification paper. and later gave the explanation that it was the last additional particle needed by the model. The bosons had already been named, and the bosons were named for having zero electric charge.
The two bosons are verified mediators of neutrino absorption and emission. During these processes, the boson charge induces electron or positron emission or absorption, thus causing nuclear transmutation.
The boson mediates the transfer of momentum, spin and energy when neutrinos scatter elastically from matter (a process which conserves charge). Such behavior is almost as common as inelastic neutrino interactions and may be observed in bubble chambers upon irradiation with neutrino beams. The boson is not involved in the absorption or emission of electrons or positrons. Whenever an electron is observed as a new free particle, suddenly moving with kinetic energy, it is inferred to be a result of a neutrino interacting with the electron (with the momentum transfer via the Z boson) since this behavior happens more often when the neutrino beam is present. In this process, the neutrino scatters off the electron (via exchange of a boson), transferring some of the neutrino's momentum to the electron.
Basic properties Physicists characterize particles by their energy equivalence at rest, using the mass energy equation to relate energy with mass. The boson mass is and the boson is .<ref name=PDG2024Z> These boson masses are larger than the energy equivalent mass of iron.
Their high masses limit the range of the weak interaction. By way of contrast, the photon is the force carrier of the electromagnetic force and has zero mass, consistent with the infinite range of electromagnetism; the hypothetical graviton is also expected to have zero mass. Although gluons are also presumed to have zero mass, the range of the strong nuclear force is limited for different reasons; see Color confinement.
All three bosons have particle spin . The emission of a or boson either lowers or raises the electric charge of the emitting particle by one unit, and also alters the spin by one unit. At the same time, the emission or absorption of a boson can change the type of the particle – for example changing a strange quark into an up quark. The neutral Z boson cannot change the electric charge of any particle, nor can it change any other of the so-called "charges" (such as strangeness, baryon number, charm, etc.). The emission or absorption of a boson can only change the spin, momentum, and energy of the other particle. (See also Weak neutral current.)
Relations to the weak nuclear force
The and bosons are carrier particles that mediate the weak nuclear force, much as the photon is the carrier particle for the electromagnetic force.
W bosons The bosons are best known for their role in beta decay. Consider, for example, the beta decay of cobalt-60.
This reaction does not involve the whole cobalt-60 nucleus, but affects only one of its 33 neutrons. The neutron is converted into a proton while also emitting an electron (often called a beta particle in this context) and an electron antineutrino:
Again, the neutron is not an elementary particle but a composite of an up quark and two down quarks (). It is one of the down quarks that interacts in beta decay, turning into an up quark to form a proton (). At the most fundamental level, then, the weak force changes the flavour of a single quark:
which is immediately followed by decay of the itself:
Z bosons The boson is its own antiparticle. Thus, all of its flavour quantum numbers and charges are zero. The exchange of a boson between particles, called a neutral current interaction, therefore leaves the interacting particles unaffected, except for a transfer of spin and/or momentum.
boson interactions involving neutrinos have distinct signatures: They provide the only known mechanism for elastic scattering of neutrinos in matter; neutrinos are almost as likely to scatter elastically (via boson exchange) as inelastically (via W boson exchange). Weak neutral currents via boson exchange were confirmed shortly thereafter (also in 1973), in a neutrino experiment in the Gargamelle bubble chamber at CERN.
Predictions of the W+, W− and Z0 bosons
Following the success of quantum electrodynamics in the 1950s, attempts were undertaken to formulate a similar theory of the weak nuclear force. This culminated around 1968 in a unified theory of electromagnetism and weak interactions by Sheldon Glashow, Steven Weinberg, and Abdus Salam, for which they shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics. Their electroweak theory postulated not only the bosons necessary to explain beta decay, but also a new boson that had never been observed.
The fact that the and bosons have mass while photons are massless was a major obstacle in developing electroweak theory. These particles are accurately described by an SU(2) gauge theory, but the bosons in a gauge theory must be massless. As a case in point, the photon is massless because electromagnetism is described by a U(1) gauge theory. Some mechanism is required to break the SU(2) symmetry, giving mass to the and in the process. The Higgs mechanism, first put forward by the 1964 PRL symmetry breaking papers, fulfills this role. It requires the existence of another particle, the Higgs boson, which has since been found at the Large Hadron Collider. Of the four components of a Goldstone boson created by the Higgs field, three are absorbed by the , , and bosons to form their longitudinal components, and the remainder appears as the spin-0 Higgs boson.
The combination of the SU(2) gauge theory of the weak interaction, the electromagnetic interaction, and the Higgs mechanism is known as the Glashow–Weinberg–Salam model. Today it is widely accepted as one of the pillars of the Standard Model of particle physics, particularly given the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson by the CMS and ATLAS experiments.
The model predicts that and bosons have the following masses:
where is the SU(2) gauge coupling, is the U(1) gauge coupling, and is the Higgs vacuum expectation value.
Discovery
Unlike beta decay, the observation of neutral current interactions that involve particles requires huge investments in particle accelerators and particle detectors, such as are available in only a few high-energy physics laboratories in the world (and then only after 1983). This is because bosons behave in somewhat the same manner as photons, but do not become important until the energy of the interaction is comparable with the relatively huge mass of the boson.
The discovery of the and bosons was considered a major success for CERN. First, in 1973, came the observation of neutral current interactions as predicted by electroweak theory. The huge Gargamelle bubble chamber photographed the tracks produced by neutrino interactions and observed events where a neutrino interacted but did not produce a corresponding lepton. This is a hallmark of a neutral current interaction and is interpreted as a neutrino exchanging an unseen boson with a proton or neutron in the bubble chamber. The neutrino is otherwise undetectable, so the only observable effect is the momentum imparted to the proton or neutron by the interaction.
The discovery of the and bosons themselves had to wait for the construction of a particle accelerator powerful enough to produce them. The first such machine that became available was the Super Proton Synchrotron, where unambiguous signals of bosons were seen in January 1983 during a series of experiments made possible by Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer. The actual experiments were called UA1 (led by Rubbia) and UA2 (led by Pierre Darriulat), and were the collaborative effort of many people. Van der Meer was the driving force on the accelerator end (stochastic cooling). UA1 and UA2 found the boson a few months later, in May 1983. Rubbia and van der Meer were promptly awarded the 1984 Nobel Prize in Physics, a most unusual step for the conservative Nobel Foundation.
The , , and bosons, together with the photon (), comprise the four gauge bosons of the electroweak interaction.
Measurements of W boson mass In May 2024, the Particle Data Group estimated the World Average mass for the W boson to be 80369.2 ± 13.3 MeV, based on experiments to date.
As of 2021, experimental measurements of the W boson mass had been similarly assessed to converge around ,P.A. Zyla et al. (Particle Data Group), Prog. Theor. Exp. Phys. 2020, 083C01 (2021) and 2021 update. https://pdg.lbl.gov/2021/reviews/rpp2021-rev-w-mass.pdf all consistent with one another and with the Standard Model.
In April 2022, a new analysis of historical data from the Fermilab Tevatron collider before its closure in 2011 determined the mass of the W boson to be , which was seven standard deviations above that predicted by the Standard Model. Besides being inconsistent with the Standard Model, the new measurement was also inconsistent with previous measurements such as ATLAS. This suggests that either the old or the new measurements had an unexpected systematic error, such as an undetected quirk in the equipment. This led to careful reevaluation of this data analysis and other historical measurement, as well as the planning of future measurements to confirm the potential new result. Fermilab Deputy Director Joseph Lykken reiterated that "... the (new) measurement needs to be confirmed by another experiment before it can be interpreted fully."
In 2023, an improved ATLAS experiment measured the W boson mass at , aligning with predictions from the Standard Model.
The Particle Data Group convened a working group on the Tevatron measurement of W boson mass, including W-mass experts from all hadron collider experiments to date, to understand the discrepancy. In May 2024 they concluded that the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) measurement was an outlier, and the best estimate of the mass came from leaving out that measurement from the meta-analysis. "The corresponding value of the W boson mass is mW = , which we quote as the World Average."M. Grünewald (University Coll. Dublin) and A. Gurtu (CERN; TIFR Mumbai) (PDG April 2024) Mass and Width of the W Boson; https://pdg.lbl.gov/2024/reviews/rpp2024-rev-w-mass.pdf
In September 2024, the CMS experiment measured the W boson mass at . This was the most precise measurement to date, obtained from observations of a large number of decays.
Decay The and bosons decay to fermion pairs but neither the nor the bosons have sufficient energy to decay into the highest-mass top quark. Neglecting phase space effects and higher order corrections, simple estimates of their branching fractions can be calculated from the coupling constants.
W bosons