He obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1973[2] under the supervision of Sidney Coleman, with whom he discovered the Coleman–Weinberg mechanism for spontaneous symmetry breaking in quantum field theory.
Usually, the way to realize spontaneous symmetry breaking is to introduce a scalar field that has a tachyonic mass parameter, classically, then the classical vacuum is the solution that stays at the bottom of the potential, with the leading quantum contribution from the uncertainty principle, the vacuum can be viewed as a Gaussian wave packet around the lowest point of the potential.
The possibility that pointed out by Sidney Coleman and E. Weinberg is, even at the classical level one tunes the mass of the scalar field to be zero, quantum correction is able to modify the effective potential, turning the point that enjoys the whole symmetry of the theory from a local minimum to a maximum, and generate new minima (vacuum) at configurations with less symmetry.
Another important point about the mechanism is, the potential remains flat with the quantum correction, if we introduce an appropriate counter-term to cancel the mass renormalization, with the minimum/maximum transition induced by a log-like term, Therefore it gives a natural arena for the idea of slow-roll inflation introduced by Linde, Albrecht and Steinhardt, which is still playing the dominant role among the theories of early universe.
In a paper with Alan Guth,[4] Erick Weinberg discussed the possibility of ending the inflation with thermalization of vacuum bubbles in a cosmological phase transition.
This problem called "graceful exit problem", discussed independently later by Stephen Hawking, Ian G. Moss and John M. Stewart,[5] then solved by the proposal of new inflation by Andrei Linde,[6] Andreas Abrecht and Paul Steinhardt,[7] which makes use of Coleman–Weinberg mechanism to generate the inflation potential that satisfies slow-roll conditions.
Such solitons could potentially explain the quantization of electric charge, as pointed out by Paul Dirac; they can arise as the classical solutions in gauge theories, like the 't Hooft–Polyakov monopole; and the inability to detect them is one of the motivations of proposing a period of inflation before the hot Big Bang phase.
Erick Weinberg, with Kimyeong Lee and Piljin Yi, did a calculation for the moduli space metric in the case of well-separated monopoles, with an arbitrary large compact gauge group