The Yukawa interaction, named after the Japanese physicist Hideki Yukawa, is a fundamental interaction responsible for the force between nucleons (protons and neutrons) in atomic nuclei. It was proposed in the context of particle physics and is a type of scalar interaction. Here are the key points about Yukawa interactions: 1. **Mediated by Mesons**: Yukawa proposed that the strong nuclear force between nucleons is mediated by the exchange of particles known as mesons.
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A Yukawa interaction couples left- and right-handed fermions through a scalar field. Replacing the Higgs field by its vacuum expectation value turns a gauge-invariant Standard Model Yukawa interaction into a fermion mass term.