Course-PM

Standard model of particle physics

TIF440  (Chalmers U./Gothenburg U.)  lp1 HT25 (7.5 hp) 

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In this page you will find all of the information needed.

I will be making small additions/adjustments until we start. We'll go through the details on the first day.

Contact details

Examiner/lecturer:  Gabriele Ferretti  (ferretti@chalmers.se)

Can be found in Origo room 6111. Tel. 031-772 3157. Mobile: 0721582259

Office Hours

I will have office hrs on Monday 13-15, Wednesday 15-17, Friday 15-17, and after the class. (Unless I need to be somewhere. I will try to announce it, in that case.) 

In case many of you come, I booked the room 6115 in the same corridor for those times (It's the first one by the entrance)

Student course evaluators

Adam Granquist
Kelmend Muriqi
Jacob Olsson
Ruben Richard
Adrian Sandberg

Prerequisites (important!)

The prerequisites for this course are any introductory course in quantum field theory where

1- you have seen the QED lagrangian

\(-\frac{1}{4} F_{\mu\nu} F^{\mu\nu} + \bar\psi (i \gamma^\mu D_\mu - m)\psi\)$$

2- you have derived its Feynman rules and

3- you have computed at least one elementary process, e.g. the Möller scattering  cross section for

\(e^-\, e^- \to e^- \, e^-\)

Being familiar with this "chain of thought" (Lagrangian --> Feynman diagrams --> Observable quantities) is very important because then you can appreciate directly from the Standard Model Lagrangian what kind of physical phenomena to expect.

I will not forbid you to take this course if you are not familiar with the above but you must then make an additional effort to cover that. I will help you (contact me) and guide you through some of the expository material below that covers this subject.

Course purpose

Course literature

The course literature consists of the material in the videos below and my lecture notes. 

...But there are lots of great books and lecture notes freely available on the web. I may refer you to some of them for details on a specific subject. Here the risk to be avoided is getting lost in too much information... 

A) There is a really nice initiative, called SCOAP3 where you find many high quality open access books on particle physics. Two books that contain additional material that can help you during the course are:

A.1) The Standard Model and Beyond, by P. Langacker (Has a lot of preliminary material. The SM itself is only Ch. 8, and some parts a bit too technical for this course.)

A.2) An Introduction to Particle Physics and the Standard Model, by R. Mann. (More basic, unfortunately he does not use the Lagrangian much.)

B) Some online lecture notes and reviews:

B.1) TASI 2013 lectures by H. E. Logan.

B.2) Lectures on the Theory of the Weak Interaction by M. E. Peskin.

B.3) From quantum mechanics to the standard model by B. Gripaios.

B.4) Standard Model: An Introduction by S.F. Novaes.

B.5) Lectures on Collider Physics by  M.D. Schwartz. 

Learning objectives

- Acquiring the prerequisite theoretical tools for the construction of models of particle physics. 

- Understand the underlying principles and structure of the Standard Model of particle physics, with particular emphasis on the Higgs mechanism and the properties of the Higgs boson. 

- Work out basic predictions of the Standard Model and compare them with experimental data.  

Videos

Once you have the prerequisite of elementary QED (see prerequisites above), to construct the Standard Model you need to acquire three more theory tools. We start with a discussion of each one of them separately, in a simpler setting. They are I) Non abelian gauge invariance, II) Spontaneous symmetry breaking and III) Chirality. This will take up the first week of the course.The "real" course begins with the videos in  section IV) Construct the Standard Model.

I) Non abelian gauge invariance and some Lie algebra.

I made a bunch of videos to introduce the concept of gauge invariance, starting with a reminder of the abelian case. It's probably too much... Skip freely the material that is already familiar to you:

Plane electromagnetic wave 

Coupling the electromagnetic field to matter

From abelian to non-abelian symmetry. U(1), U(n), SU(n) groups and Lie algebras.

 Generators of the Lie algebra SU(n).

SU(2), SU(3), Pauli and Gell-Mann matrices.

More on representations of SU(3)

 Need for a covariant derivative

The covariant derivative of QCD

Gluon field strength.

The QCD Lagrangian and Feynman rules.

II) Spontaneous symmetry breaking. Global vs. Gauge symmetry. 

Here are some lectures reminding you the basics of symmetry breaking. Again, skip if you know this. Make sure you understand the difference between discrete/continuous, global/gauged, broken/unbroken symmetries. 

Introduction

Interlude: Comparing classical mech. quantum mech. and QFT.

Breaking of a global symmetry

Gauge U(1) symmetry.

Interlude: Meaning of a mass term for the gauge field.

Summary

III) Chiral spinors.

And now a few videos on chirality. I just focus on the parts that are relevant for the construction of the Standard Model lagrangian. You could look up additional material in one of the refs above (or your favorite QFT source).

 Representations of the Lorentz group

Spinor representations. Left and right handed components.

The Dirac Lagrangian and the coupling to gauge fields.

And now we are ready to: 

IV) Construct the Standard Model. 

Examination form