truction of single elementary particles - particles that do not exist in matter-antimatter pairs (seen as radioactivity, particle decay/transformation, fission). Elementary particles created today must be interchangeable with those created during the “Big Bang” with respect to all conserved parameters – mass, spin, charge, etc. Creating absolutely invariant singleelementary particles any time or place is the conservation challenge presented to and surmounted by the weak force, requiring the elaborate mechanism of the Higgs boson and the Intermediate Vector Bosons (IVBs). The great mass of the IVBs recreates the original energy density and unified force symmetry state in which the elementary particle classes (leptons and quarks) were first created, while the Higgs boson “gauges” (scales and selects) the IVBs and unified force symmetry state (there are several) appropriate to the transformation at hand. It is the quantization of the Higgs boson and the IVBs (plus virtual particles drawn from the global “vacuum sea”) that ensures the invariance of the weak force transformation mechanism. The weak force charge is “identity” charge (AKA “number” or “flavor” charge), and is carried implicitly by all massive leptons (including leptoquarks) and explicitly by neutrinos.
Although this is a somewhat technical paper (but without mathematics), there should be much of interest in the mechanism of the “W” particle for the general reader, since in the action of the IVBs, we glimpse the fearful asymmetry of creation.
The first version of this paper was written in April 1983, submitted to two physics journals in 1985 (rejected by both), and submitted to the Archives of Physics on 9 Aug. 2000 (with several subsequent updates). Unlike my other papers which are mainly of theoretical or philosophical interest, this paper is also potentially of significant technical utility, since it treats the reaction pathways of nuclear transformations.
The “W” is one of several “Intermediate Vector Bosons” (“IVBs”) of the weak force (see: “The Particle Table”). Bosons are the “field vectors” or force carriers of the four forces. Bosons are particles or “force quanta” produced by charges; there is associated with every charge a boson responsible for the transmission of the actual force associated with the charge. In the quantum mechanical interpretation of modern physics, every force is transmitted by an actual quantized particle. This notion supplants the classical Newtonian idea of “action at a distance” (which even Newton didn’t like). The bosons of the electromagnetic force are “photons”; “gravitons” are the bosons of the gravitational force; “gluons” and mesons are the bosons of the (two-level) strong force; and the very strange “IVBs” (W+. W-, Z, and hypothetical X) are the bosons of the weak force. These weak force bosons are called “Intermediate” because unlike other bosons, they have a large mass, whereas all other bosons are massless. The “W” and “Z” IVBs are about 80-90 times (respectively) more massive than the proton; the hypothetical “X”, presumably responsible for proton decay and the creation of matter itself, is thought to be much more massive.
The huge mass of the IVBs immediately tells us they are very strange particles indeed, because they cannot be made out of the usual nuclear material – quarks and gluons. What then is the “stuff” they are composed of? This is not “atomic matter” in the sense we are familiar with, and these are not particles in the sense we are familiar with, either. The IVBs are particles of interaction only – they are metric catalysts, mediators, or “brokers” which allow and facilitate transformations and decays within and between the “families” of elementary particles, the quarks and leptons, which are respectively the constituents of the nucleus and the electron shell of atomic matter. The “W” IVB is a type of “virtual” particle which exists only during the reaction it catalyzes and is otherwise not seen. Like all virtual particles, the “W” IVB is always potentially present but is actually materialized only within 