History of quantum field theory
The third thread in the development of quantum field theory was the need to handle the statistics of many-particle systems consistently and with ease. In 1927, Pascual Jordan tried to extend the canonical quantization of fields to the many-body wave functions of identical particles using a formalism which is known as statistical transformation theory; this procedure is now sometimes called second quantization. In 1928, Jordan and Eugene Wigner found that the quantum field describing electrons, or other fermions, had to be expanded using anti-commuting creation and annihilation operators due to the Pauli exclusion principle (see Jordan–Wigner transformation). This thread of development was incorporated into many-body theory and strongly influenced condensed matter physics and nuclear physics.
Quantum electrodynamics
QED has served as the model and template for all subsequent quantum field theories. One such subsequent theory is quantum chromodynamics, which began in the early 1960s and attained its present form in the 1970s work by H. David Politzer, Sidney Coleman, David Gross and Frank Wilczek. Building on the pioneering work of Schwinger, Gerald Guralnik, Dick Hagen, and Tom Kibble, Peter Higgs, Jeffrey Goldstone, and others, Sheldon Lee Glashow, Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam independently showed how the weak nuclear force and quantum electrodynamics could be merged into a single electroweak force.