What theory earned Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg the 1979 Physics Nobel Prize?

Electroweak theory earned Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Their work unified the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force into a single electroweak framework. The theory predicts that these forces were aspects of one interaction at extremely high energies, while a symmetry-breaking mechanism makes them appear different at ordinary energies.

The model predicted the existence of the W and Z bosons, which were discovered at CERN in 1983. It also connects the Higgs mechanism with the masses of elementary particles. Electroweak theory is not the same as the broader Standard Model: it forms one major part of that model, alongside quantum chromodynamics, which describes the strong interaction.