The weak interaction is one of the four fundamental forces of nature, along with gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear force. It is responsible for radioactive decay and plays a crucial role in the nuclear reactions that power the sun and other stars.
The weak interaction is governed by three conservation laws: conservation of electric charge, conservation of lepton number, and conservation of baryon number. These laws state that the total charge, number of leptons, and number of baryons must remain constant in any weak interaction process.
The weak interaction is the only fundamental force that violates parity symmetry, which means that it does not behave the same way under a mirror reflection. This was first observed in the decay of certain particles, which were found to preferentially decay in one direction over the other.
The Higgs boson is a fundamental particle that was predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics and was discovered in 2012. It is responsible for giving particles their mass, including the W and Z bosons that mediate the weak interaction.
Chirality is a property of particles that describes their handedness or spin direction. The weak interaction is sensitive to this property and can cause particles to change from one chirality to another. This is known as weak interaction chirality violation and is responsible for the different masses of particles and antiparticles.