Written by an award-winning former director-general of CERN and one of the world’s leading experts on particle physics, Electroweak Interactions explores the concepts that led to unification of the weak and electromagnetic interactions. It provides the fundamental elements of the theory of compact Lie groups and their representations, enabling a basic understanding of the role of flavor symmetry in particle physics.

The book begins with the identification of the weak hadronic current with the isotopic spin current, Yang–Mills theory, and the first electroweak theory of Glashow. It discusses spontaneous breaking of a global symmetry and a local symmetry, covering the Goldstone theorem, Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism, and the theory of Weinberg and Salam. The author then describes the theory of quarks, quark mixing, the Cabibbo angle, the Glashow–Iliopoulos–Maiani (GIM) mechanism, the theory of Kobayashi and Maskawa, six quark flavors, and CP violation.