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Welcome to our Physics lesson on The Electroweak Interaction, this is the fourth lesson of our suite of physics lessons covering the topic of Big Bang Model and Temperature, you can find links to the other lessons within this tutorial and access additional physics learning resources below this lesson.
In Particles Physics, this type of interaction represents the unification of two of the four fundamental forces in nature: electromagnetic and weak. More specifically, today there is a confirmed theory of unification for only two out of four main types of interaction: electromagnetic and weak interactions. This theory is known as the standard model (discover more in the previous section). In this model, both interactions are symmetrical, i.e. all mediating particles that realize such interactions manifest the same properties and behavior. They have zero rest mass, the same range of action and the same probability to produce the bosons resulting by this interaction after pairing process takes place.
The standard model is valid for particles with temperatures higher than 1015 K. This value corresponds to an energy of E = 100 GeV. A break in symmetry occurs at this temperature. The bosons resulted from electroweak interaction gain a rest mass of 100 GeV. In such conditions, the weak and electromagnetic interactions manifest the differences we know today.
You have reached the end of Physics lesson 22.10.4 The Electroweak Interaction. There are 6 lessons in this physics tutorial covering Big Bang Model and Temperature, you can access all the lessons from this tutorial below.
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