Particle Physics (Physics 363)
Sean Carroll
Spring quarter, 2001
(top quark production and decay from p-pbar collision, from The Particle Adventure)
Description
Physics 363 will meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9:00 to 10:20 a.m. It is the graduate course in particle physics.
Description from the course catalog:
363. Particle Physics. PQ: Phys 237 and 342. This course covers the following topics: the properties of elementary particles; strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions; CPT symmetries; SU(3) symmetry; hadronic structure and interactions in terms of quark and gluon substructure; CP violation and KM mixing of quark fields; introduction to electroweak theory; quark and lepton interaction at high energy; current experiments; and detectors in high-energy physics. Spring.
Grading
The final grade will be based 60% on problem sets and 40% on a final paper. You are encouraged to talk to your fellow students about the problem sets, but make sure that what you hand in is produced by you. The paper will focus on a single experimental result, covering the history, techniques, and physical processes involved.
To answer what you really want to know: No, you won’t need to know quantum field theory. I will be using results from QFT, but I will go over all of them (minus derivations) in class. For those of you who are already quite familiar with QFT, a little review never hurt anybody.
Dates
Important new date information:
We will not have class on Thursday, May 31. Instead, we will have a one-hour make-up class from 9:00 to 10:00 on Wednesday May 30. We will meet in Kersten 305.
The final problem set is due at noon on Thursday, May 31. I won’t be around, but you can leave them in Yin-e’s mailbox in Kersten 205.
Final papers will be due at noon on Wednesday, June 6, in my office (RI262).
Late papers and homeworks will be penalized. (Sorry, but otherwise there’s just not enough time to grade them.)
Personnel
Sean Carroll, Professor
Yin-e Sun, Grader
Outline
- Our Friends, The Particles
- Special Relativity and Field Theory
- Particle Processes and Feynman Diagrams
- Symmetries
- Quantum Electrodynamics
- The Strong Interactions and Quantum Chromodynamics
- The Weak Interactions and Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking
Problem Sets
Problem sets will be handed out on Thursdays, due the following Thursday.
Books
Click on the titles to see the amazon.com entry for each book. You can even buy them online if you like.
- D. Griffiths, Introduction to Elementary Particles (Wiley, 1987).
This will be the main text. It needs to be supplemented for some details, but the explanations are typically clear and correct. - F. Halzen and A.D. Martin, Quarks and Leptons: An Introductory Course in Modern Particle Physics (Wiley, 1984).
A standard text, which has been used in previous years. - C. Quigg, Gauge Theories of the Strong, Weak and Electromagnetic Interactions (Perseus, 1997).
Slightly more advanced, jumps right in to calculating cross-sections. - T.-P. Cheng and L.-F. Li, Gauge Theory of Elementary Particle Physics (Oxford, 1988).
Presumes you know field theory, but chock full of useful info. - D.H. Perkins, Introduction to High Energy Physics (Addison-Wesley, 1987).
Another standard reference. - G. Kane, Modern Elementary Particle Physics : The Fundamental Particles and Forces (Perseus, 1993).
This book is intended for undergrads, and doesn’t always bother to get factors of order unity correct in calculations, but is a very useful resource.
Other Resources
- Notes for Nuclear and Particle Physics by Niels Walet (Manchester)
- Fermilab
- Argonne
- CERN
- SLAC
- Brookhaven
- Particle Data Group home page
- SPIRES High-Energy Physics Database (preprints, citations)
- Experiments Online: Home Pages of HEP Experiments
- HEPIC — High Energy Physics Information Center
- The Particle Adventure