By L Brink and K K Phua (eds)
World Scientific
Since their first formulation, and following development that took place between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1970s, Yang–Mills gauge field theories have proven to be the cornerstone of theoretical physics. Up to now, they represent the only relativistic quantum many-body corpus of theories in four space–time dimensions that appear to be fully consistent. The Yang–Mills theories for the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces are the framework of the Standard Model of particle physics, which has been proven to be the correct theory at the energies that we can measure.
In May 2015, the International Conference on 60 years of Yang–Mills Gauge Theories was held at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Singapore, in order to commemorate this anniversary. Renowned physicists from all over the world participated and gave interesting talks on different aspects of the theories, as well as on their role outside particle physics, in particular in condensed-matter and statistical physics.
Chen Ning Yang, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957 together with Tsung-Dao Lee for another work, the discovery of parity violations, gave a talk at the conference. The same was not possible for Robert Mills, co-father of these theories, because he passed away in 1999. The emphasis of the conference was given to Yang’s contributions to physics in general.
This book collects together the talks given at the conference by Yang and the invited speakers, reviewing these remarkable contributions and their importance for the future of physics. Authors include D Gross, L Brink, M Fisher, L Faddeev, S L Wu, T T Wu, T Zee and many others.
