Like any other field in a quantum-mechanical theory, this new field that is responsible for electroweak symmetry breaking would have an energy and momentum that come in bundles, known as quanta. The electroweak theory tells us that at least one of these quanta should be observable as a new elementary particle. Several years before Salam and I developed a theory of weak and electromagnetic forces based on spontaneous symmetry breaking, the mathematics of simpler examples of this sort of symmetry breaking had been described by a number of theorists, most clearly in 1964 by Peter Higgs of the
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