What We Have Leaned from the Highest Energy e⁺e^- Collider LEP

Abstract

Many developments in the basic science have occurred in the 20th century. The particle physics, an important trail of contemporary physics towards the understanding of the fundamental structure of the matters in nature and the rules which govern it, has also made impressive progress. Based on the modern knowledges on the particle physics, we are now discussing about ‘birth and evolution of the universe’, ‘what is the vacuum’, ‘origin of the mass’, ‘unification of the forces’.
The highest energy e⁺e^- collider LEP was build to make a thorough and systematic studies of the fundamental theory and to explore the new energy domain where totally new phenomena may show up. The 12 years of successful running of LEP has ended in autumn 2000. Efforts are continuing to extract as much physics from the data. In this article, a trial is made to review, though may be rather biased, what we have learned from LEP.