An Introduction to Particle Physics and the Standard Model

Abstract

The purpose of this book is to introduce 4th-year or senior undergraduate students to what is known as the Standard Model of Particle Physics, the model that presently encompasses all of our empirical knowledge about the subject. Particle physics was in a near-continual state of ux for several decades, nally settling down around the mid 1990s when the mass of the Z boson had been accurately measured, the number of light quarks and leptons had been established, and the top quark had been discovered. The Standard Model has since then faced pretty much every experimental challenge to its authority with ying colors, and today it stands as the established fundamental theory of the non-gravitational interactions, describing all known forms of subatomic matter that we have observed. The goal of this book is to familiarize students with the Standard Model and in so doing, with particle physics in general. It grew out of a one-term course I have taught at the University of Waterloo nearly every year over the past two decades. It was an interesting course to teach because the subject matter would change as particle physics continued to develop, with new results coming out from LEP, Fermilab, Super-K, SNO and more on the experimental side, and from supersymmetry, string theory, and lattice gauge theory on the theoretical side. Students taking the course typically had taken at least one course in quantum mechanics (in which they would have seen the solution to the hydrogen atom from Schroedingers equation), one in mathematical physics (covering vector calculus, Fourier transforms, and complex functions), and had a solid background in special relativity (having encountered the basic phenomena of length contraction and time dilation).