When CERN saw the end of the alphabet

The discovery of the W and Z particles was a definitive vindication of the idea of gauge theories as appropriate descriptions of nature at this level, and the unified electroweak model combined with QCD became known as the Standard Model. In the 10 years of experimentation at LEP, this Standard Model became one of the most thoroughly tested theories in physics, down to the level of a part in a thousand. However, in the SU(2) * U(1) scheme with spontaneous symmetry breaking, one of the four scalars that did not disappear into the W+or- and Z masses has still to be found - and the discovery of the Standard Model Higgs, in the ATLAS and CMS detectors at CERN should eventually complete this story. (5 refs).