Winter 2010 - Elementary Particle Physics
UCSB Physics 225b and UCSD Physics 222
Mondays 2:00-3:20 and Tuesdays 2:00-3:20
UCSB: Broida 5223
UCSD: CLICS, Room 260 Galbraith Hall
What this course is about
Welcome to the homepage of 2nd quarter of
the 4th joint UCSB/UCSD elementary particle physics class.
This is the second quarter of a two quarter sequence in elementary particle physics. This
course is intended to give the student a broad foundation in the phenomenology of
modern particle physics.
This is not intended to be a formal course in particle theory.
The emphasis is on the understanding of the basic
concepts as applied to real world situations and on doing simple calculations.
Most students will be concurrently taking a more formal course in field theory.
The expectation is that the field theory course will serve as
a more formal complement to the treatment given in this class.
Understanding of quantum
mechanics at the graduate level would be very helpful, but undergraduate quantum
mechanics would suffice.
Instructors
Lectures are given by Professor Wuerthwein from UCSD. Professor Campagnari is the
contact person at UCSB. Contact information is
given below.
| Who |
Office |
Phone |
email |
im |
Office Hours |
| Frank Wuerthwein |
Mayer 5515 (UCSD) |
Phone: 885 774 7035 (cell) |
fkw at ucsd dot edu |
im: fkw888 at aim |
Monday after class (or anytime you can find him) |
| Claudio Campagnari |
Broida 5119 (UCSB) |
Phone: 805 893-7567 |
claudio at hep dot ucsb dot edu |
im: claudiocampagnar |
whenever you can find me |
Announcements
Announcements are usually sent out via email and archived here.
Syllabus
First Quarter
- General Introduction, Natural Units
- Lifetimes and branching fractions, partial widths, Breit-Wigner
- Interactions of particles with matter (very basic).
- Symmetries, Conservation Laws
- Group Theory for dummies
- Isospin, SU(3)flavor, quark model of hadrons
- Quarkonium discoveries
- Neutrino masses, mixing, and oscillations
- Electrodynamics of S=0 particles
- Cross-sections
- Review of Dirac equation (if needed)
- Electrodynamics of S=1/2 particles (QED)
- Deep inelastic scattering, parton model
- Parton distribution functions, hadronic cross-sections
- QCD corrections, scaling violations, Altarelli-Parisi equation (may
need to go in 2nd quarter)
Second Quarter
- Fermi Theory, V-A
- Intermediate Vector Boson idea
- GIM Mechanism
- Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking, Goldstone Bosons, Higgs Bosons
- Electroweak Theory, SU(2)xU(1)
- Precision electroweak tests
- Standard Model Higgs Phenomenology: mass, naturalness, production
mechanisms, decay modes, experimental prospects
- Mixing and CP violation (K, D, and B systems)
- Taking a stroll through the dominant standard model processes at the LHC
- new physics that might hit us within the first 100pb-1 of LHC data
Textbook
The textbook is
Quarks and Leptons: An Introductory Course in Modern Particle Physics by Halzen and Martin.
This is an excellent book at about the right level for this course. The main problem
with it is that it is 20 years old, so many of the new developments in particle physics
are missing. We will provide additional material to supplement it.
In addition, we recommend that you obtain a copy of the
Review of Particle Physics. This includes
a comprehensive compilation
of data on particle physics as well as short review articles and
miscellaneous other useful stuff. The Review of Particle Physics
is published
every two years (on even years). It can be obtained for free
from the Particle Data Group (PDG).
However we know that they
have already started to distribute copies to their long time
subscribers). While you wait for the PDG to send your very own copy,
you may be able to borrow an older copy from your instructor (just ask).
Note also that the content of the Review of Particle Physics is also
available online from the PDG website.
Other books that you might find useful include (these are on reserve at Science and Engineering library at UCSD):
These will be added as time goes on. Please chack this section of
the web page often.
Whenever possible we provide links that can be
accessed without passwords or subscriptions. Unfortunately this
is not always possible, since sometime the only available link
is to the electronic version of the journal where the paper
was published. For copyright reasons we are not
allowed to post these papers directly on our website.
However, UCSB and UCSD have electronic subscriptions to most Physics
journals, and if you work on a machine with a ucsb.edu or ucsd.edu
domain you should be able to get to the paper without any
problem. If you are trying to access the paper from home, while
logged on through a commercial ISP, you may encounter
problems. However, if you are a UCSB student there
are ways to setup your browser to circumvent these issues,
see the instructions posted
here.
- A nice review paper on the properties of the muon and what you can learn from
precise studies of muon decays by Kuno and Okada:
arXiv server or
Rev. Mod. Physics server.
- The original paper on the GIM mechanism can be found
here.
- Bob Cahn has written an interesting article on how the
parameters of the Standard
Model affect your life:
Rev. Mod. Phys. 68 951 (1996).
- Two good pedagogical reviews of the Higgs in the Standard Model
have been written by
Sally Dawson
and Chris Quigg.
- An early paper that discusses the hierarchy problem, and suggests
a way to generate W and Z masses without the Higgs is
L. Susskind Phys. Rev. D20 2619 (1979). This is an
example of a Technicolor theory.
-
- A review of precision electroweak measurements:
M. Martinez, R. Miquel, L. Rolandi, and R. Tenchini,
Rev. Mod. Phys. 71 575 (1999)
- The website of the LEP Electroweak
Working group. This is the group that is charged with averaging all of the
electroweak measurements and performing a global analysis.
- The website of the
LEP Higgs Working group, with all the details on searches for the Higgs at LEP2.
- The
original paper on the discovery of CP-violation.
- Jeff Richman's 1997
Les Houches
Summer School lectures on heavy quark physics and CP violation.
This writeup has over 230 pages, if you are at UCSB you may want to ask Jeff for a copy!
- The website of the
Heavy Flavor averaging group. This is a group that averages experiemntal results from
different experiments in heavy flavor physics.
- Here are the webistes of two competing groups that take experimental data and
theoretical predictions to perform global fits
of unitarity triangle parameters:
- CKMFITTER
- UTFIT
- Here
is a cute paper that uses the entangled B0-B0bar state from
upsilon decay to test basic quantum mechanics.
- An old (but good)
E. Farhi and L. Susskind, Physics Reports 74C (1981) 277.
- A couple articles on PDF's and QCD that Joey Huston sent me.
- Educational intro material on where PDF's come from.
- Hard Interactions of Quarks and Gluons: a Primer for LHC Physics
- A couple of review articles on Little Higgs models:
- M. Perelstein, hep-ph/0512128
- M. Schmalz and D. Tucker-Dmith, hep-ph/0502182
- A very recent review of Zprime physics
- Paul Langacker "The Physics of Heavy Z Gauge Bosons" hep-ph/0801.1345
Lecture Notes
As a complement to the normal lectures, we will have each student
give one roughly 30min presentation. This presentation will contribute
20% to your grade. The remainder is 30% homework, and 50% for the take-home final.
These presentations will probably happen during regular lecture time.
You should think of these as serious mini research projects, documented by a talk
instead of a term paper. I will want to review each presentation at least one week prior
to it being given.
This Quarter I want to focus on actual analyses that either have been done, or are proposed.
"Are proposed" may include something you cook up, or something that you find in the literature.
From the experimentalists,
I will expect some work with comphep, madgraph, or alike to show the kinematics of the final state
you are discussing, as well as as discussion of the main backgrounds. Basically, something along the lines of the
final exam last quarter.
Here some examples to stimulate ideas.
- Zprime physics. See the Langacker paper mentioned above.
- Wprime physics. I'll find you literature for this if somebody picks it.
- Higgs physics beyond the standard model. In class we discuss standard model higgs in
some detail, as well as a general introduction to the 2 Higgs doublet models. There are plenty more
options to explore, including higgsless models of EWK symmetry breaking. Examples include:
- Higgs in the MSSM (this is just a specific implementation of 2 Higgs Doublet Model
- little Higgs models (see papers linked in above)
- higgsless models
What signatures are there that are different from the standard model? Design an analysis strategy.
Show the kinematics by
using a generator, and compare with standard model kinematics.Estimate the feasibility of a search.
How much data would one need at CMS to observe or rule out some part of phase space of these models.
Basically, pick one, look through the literature, and provide us with a summary.
- Dark Matter beyond SUSY LSP. Explore non-standard model physics that leads to dark matter
candidates that are viable to explain cosmic darm matter but do not involve SUSY.
The specific example I'd suggest here is Arkani-Hamed idea that leads to "lepton-jets". (hep-ph/0810.0714)
- Take your pick from the Atlas physics "phonebook". You can get it here .
- Take your pick form the list of public results by the CMS Exotics group
here . E.g.:
- Large Extra Dimensions (diphoton, monojet + MET, monophoton + MET)
- Technocolor
- New charged Vector bosons in minimal higgsless models
Grading will be based on the final (50%) and the homework (30%), and your talk (20%). The
date and time of the take-home final will be announced later.
Homework
UCSD students should drop-off their homework in class on the due date.