Scope of the lecture
This lecture is some kind of experiment. We will try to teach the students
some of the concepts, methods, and tools that are central for those who
would like to work in the field of particle physics phenomenology. Therefore,
this lecture is a starting point only for further studies; however, it
should give a flavour of the fascination of particle physics and it should
prepare the students for some first research work on their own.
It should be clear that such a lecture can provide an overview only and
that it can by far not be exhaustive: Many of the concepts presented here are
suitable subjects for lectures of their own. Therefore, we would like to
refer to more specialised lectures such as "Detectors" or "Quantum field
theory".
However, this lecture assumes that the students attending it study the
problems at the end of each section. These problems repeat some of the
issues of the lecture and they are meant to further deepen the understanding.
In this respect, some of them cover issues in more detail that were only
scetched during the lecture. The study of these problems should enable
each student to successfully pass the exam at the end of the term.
In addition, there will be some computer-oriented problems on different
levels of (computer) sophistication. Their degree of complexity ranges from
using Root, which is the basic tool for analyses of modern experiments in
particle physics, to some minor programming exercises. In the latter, the
students will be asked to modify or to slighlty extent computer code,
written in C++, that will be given to them. We hope that these
computer-oriented problems equip students with some of the basic skills
neccessary to do research work on their own.
However, these problems are based on some C++ code, which can be downloaded
here. There are two tarred-gzipped files,
Exes.tar.gz and
Libs.tar.gz; after downlaoding them,
they should be un-tarred and un-zipped through "tar -zxvf XXXs.tar.gz" and
then they should be compiled through "make" in the respective directory.
In so doing, please, compile the "libs"-directory first.
In the preparation of this lecture, the following books and other sources
have been used:
- F.Halzen & A.D.Martin: "Quarks & Leptons"
- B.Hatfield: "Quantum field theory of point particles and strings"
- H.Georgi: "Lie algebras and particle physics"
- H.M.Pilkun: "Relativistic quantum mechanics"
- C.Quigg: "Gauge theory of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interaction"