The Discovery of the Z Boson

In this video, we discuss how the Z boson was discovered in proton-antiproton collisions by the UA1 and UA2 experiments at CERN in 1983. The discovery was critical for the establishment of the Standard Model of particle physics and, along with the discovery of the W boson, earned the Nobel Prize in physics in 1984.

We briefly review the particle content and interactions of the Standard Model of particle physics and discuss how a Z boson would be produced and detected. We briefly give the results of the experiments and show that their results do satisfy the conventional 5-sigma criterion for a discovery in particle physics.

Mentioned in the video:

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