Electroweak epoch

The early-universe period before electroweak symmetry breaking, when electromagnetic and weak interactions were manifestations of one electroweak gauge interaction.

Electroweak symmetry breaking: The transition in which the Higgs field's nonzero vacuum value separates electromagnetic and weak interactions. It marks the epoch's end and the emergence of distinct electromagnetic and weak forces.
Electroweak interaction: The unified gauge interaction that combines electromagnetic and weak interactions in the Standard Model. It is the interaction whose high-temperature phase characterized this epoch.
Big Bang: The expansion of the universe from an early hot, dense state into the cosmos observed today. The electroweak epoch is one stage in the universe's early expansion history.
Baryogenesis: The physical processes that generated the observed excess of matter over antimatter in the universe. Electroweak-era processes are one proposed setting for creating the cosmic matter excess.
Higgs field: A quantum field whose nonzero vacuum value gives mass to elementary particles through their interactions with it. Its changing state drove electroweak symmetry breaking.
Electroweak theory: The Standard Model framework that unifies electromagnetic and weak interactions through the gauge group SU(2) × U(1). Its gauge structure describes the unified interactions before symmetry breaking.
Early universe: The hot, dense cosmic era preceding the formation of stars, galaxies, and large-scale structure. This epoch belongs to the universe's first moments, when particle physics shaped cosmic conditions.
Electroweak baryogenesis: A class of models in which a first-order electroweak phase transition generates the universe's matter–antimatter asymmetry. These models tie matter's survival directly to the electroweak transition.
Higgs mechanism: The process by which a gauge theory's symmetry-breaking field gives mass to gauge bosons without explicit mass terms. It explains how the weak bosons became massive while the photon remained massless.
Gauge symmetry: A redundancy in the mathematical description of fields that underlies gauge theories and their interactions. The epoch's defining unity was a gauge symmetry of the electroweak theory.

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