Elementary Particle Physics: An Intuitive Introduction

Описание

include discussions of recent results, the most prominent of which is the
discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012.
However, to describe and motivate why the discovery of the Higgs was so
important requires significant background, covering topics ranging from
electroweak symmetry breaking to the dynamics of proton scattering,
quantum loops in Feynman diagrams, particle detector experiments, and
statistical analyses, among others. Therefore, in some sense, there simply
isn’t space in a modern particle physics textbook to describe every major
result since the 1920s. By the end of the course a student should be able to
understand almost any plot produced by the experiments at the LHC.
This book was born out of the particle physics class at Reed College,
which I taught during the spring semester of 2017. The twin goals of this
textbook are to be up-to-date and to build concepts from the ground up, based
firmly on physical intuition. This book provides an intuitive explanation for
the physics being introduced. This is necessarily an ahistorical approach,
which has consequences for how topics are introduced and motivated as
compared to other textbooks. With a modern viewpoint, we can identify past
results and predictions that had an outsized impact on the field as a whole.
For example, interpreting results at the LHC requires use of proton collision
simulations, referred to as parton shower programs. The physical basis for the
parton shower is the DGLAP splitting functions, which were developed in the
1970s as a consequence of QCD. Thus it is vital for interpretation of results
from the LHC to understand and appreciate the DGLAP splitting functions.
Chapter 9 covers this topic.
A potential drawback of this approach is that it is not encyclopedic. Any
undergraduate textbook on particle physics suffers from this, however. A full
mathematical treatment of particle physics requires quantum field theory,
which is (at least) a year-long graduate-level course. So, there will be some
things for which the motivation is less than ideal. The most prominent of
these is the construction and calculation of Feynman diagrams, which are
motivated in this book in analogy to circuit diagrams, but their mathematical
justification lies well beyond such a course. Similarly, to understand all of the
intricacies of experimental measurements requires years of actually working
on the experiments. Only then can you understand where the systematic
uncertainties come from, the limitations of your detector, and all of the blood,
sweat, and tears that went into a measurement, which is sometimes just a
single number.

Детали