Nonabelian Generalization of Electric-Magnetic Duality: A Brief Review

摘要

The question whether the electric-magnetic duality of electromagnetism is211u001egeneralizable to nonabelian Yang-Mills theories is of course a classic 211u001etheoretical problem of fundamental interest in its own right. Recently, however, 211u001ethis long-standing question has been given a new urgency by the realization that 211u001eits application to the Standard Model in particle physics can lead to an 211u001eunderstanding for the existence both of the Higgs fields required for symmetry 211u001ebreaking and of the three generations of fermions experimentally observed, 211u001ebesides offering at the same time an explanation for the values of some of the 211u001eStandard Model's many empirical parameters. In this paper, the authors breifly 211u001ereview the steps leading to a solution to this problem suggested a couple of 211u001eyears ago.