Tristan Hübsch - Advanced Concepts in Particle and Field Theory

Uniting the usually distinct areas of particle physics and quantum field theory, gravity and general relativity, this expansive and comprehensive textbook of fundamental and theoretical physics describes the quest to consolidate the basic building blocks of nature, by journeying through contemporary discoveries in the field, and analyzing elementary particles and their interactions.

Designed for advanced undergraduates and graduate students and abounding in worked examples and detailed derivations, as well as including historical anecdotes and philosophical and methodological perspectives, this textbook provides students with a unified understanding of all matter at the fundamental level. Topics range from gauge principles, particle decay and scattering cross-sections, the Higgs mechanism and mass generation, to spacetime geometries and supersymmetry. By combining historically separate areas of study and presenting them in a logically consistent manner, students will appreciate the underlying similarities and conceptual connections to be made in these fields.

Tristan H bsch is a Professor of Physics at Howard University, Washington DC, where he specializes in elementary particle physics, field theory and strings.

To the clouds that are fuzzy,
to the brooks that babble,
and to curiosity.

I think we may yet be able to [understand atoms].
But in the process we may have to learn what
the word understanding really means.
Niels Bohr , p.41 ]

PHYSICS MAY BE DEFINED AS THE DISCIPLINE OF UNDERSTANDING NATURE. This definition is about as good as any other I can think of, although or perhaps exactly because much of the material in the following chapters is required even just to more precisely describe what it is we are to understand under discipline , understanding and Nature . That is, what is the nature of disciplining our understanding of something of which we ourselves are a part: Nature.

True to the meaning of the Greek original , physics is indeed concerned with all aspects of Nature. Molecular phenomena are the objects of study in both chemistry and physics, which disciplines are separate but tightly related through quantum physics [

Of course, a mere reduction of all phenomena to a common denominator achieves very little other than irking those who would rather keep up the appearance of separateness or those who insist on irreducible wholeness. Hoping that this has nudged the Reader to think along (or against) such sweepingly unifying avenues of human understanding of Nature, let us turn to the real focus of this tome: to the fundamental physics of elementary particles.

Subject This book represents an attempt of a compact but comprehensive review of some of the key questions in contemporary fundamental physics, traditionally called both elementary particle physics and high energy physics . The correlation between these concepts is not at all accidental: The voyage towards an idealized but also pragmatically useful fundamental understanding of Nature really does lead through the world of ever smaller objects, the study of which requires ever larger energies in a complementary way.

The concept of elementary particles is in this sense a Democritean ideal , but it is also an evolving idea: On one hand, we follow this twenty-five-century hypothesis that the World around us may be understood as a complex system, ultimately consisting of certain basic and indivisible objects elementary particle s . On the other hand, the past two centuries of the history of science warn us that concrete things (and ideas) in Nature, which we at times identify as elementary , not infrequently later turn out to be themselves composed of more elementary things (and ideas). In this sense, the list of elementary particles was very short in the first third of the twentieth century. Everything in Nature was understood to consist of either the elementary particles (matter) the electron , the proton , the neutron and (hypothetically) the neutrino or a form of their interaction, which could also be represented in terms of exchanging elementary particles such as the photon . Soon enough, however, hundreds of new particles were discovered. Already their unrelentingly growing number vanquished all hope that all these particles could really be elementary. Indeed, even the proton and the neutron were soon shown to be consistently describable as composite systems; they both consist of more elementary quarks .

To date, no experiment indicates revoking elementariness from quarks () and leptons (