Force force. Here the strong force acts indirectly, transmitted as gluons, which form part of the virtual pi and rho mesons, which classically transmit the nuclear force (see this topic for more). The failure of many searches for free quarks has shown that the elementary particles affected are not directly observable. This phenomenon is called color confinement. The weak force is due to the exchange of the heavy W and Z bosons. Its most familiar effect is beta decay (of neutrons in atomic nuclei) and the associated radioactivity. The word "weak" derives from the fact that the field strength is some
W and Z bosons the pillars of the Standard Model of particle physics, particularly given the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson by the CMS and ATLAS experiments. The model predicts that W and Z bosons have the following masses: where g is the SU(2) gauge coupling, g' is U(1) gauge coupling, and v is the Higgs vacuum expectation value. Unlike beta decay, the observation of neutral current interactions that involve particles requires huge investments in particle accelerators and detectors, such as are available in only a few high-energy physics laboratories in the world (and then only after 1983). This is because Z-bosons behave