Particle Physics: A Los Alamos Primer

by Edited by Necia Grant Cooper , Geoffrey B. West

• ISBN13: 9780521347808
• ISBN10: 0521347807
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1988-04-29
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This lively well-illustrated collection of articles written by a group of particle physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory presents to the expert and non-expert alike a comprehensive overview of the major theoretical and experimental advances of the past twenty years. It explains the emergence of a profoundly new understanding of the fundamental forces of Nature. With the unification of the weak and electromagnetic interaction, physicists now stand at the brink of a complete unification of all the forces, including gravity. This achievement brought with it a rich vocabulary of names and concepts: quarks, gluons and nonabelian gauge theories. The exposition of these ideas, done on a variety of technical levels is designed to interest a broad audience ranging from the professional theorist and experimentalist to the inquisitive student. Anyone with an interest in particle physics can enjoy this book.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Theoretical Framework

Scale and dimension - From animals to quarks

Particle physics and the standard model

QCD on a Cray: the masses of elementary particles Gerald Guralnik

Lecture Notes - From simple field theories to the standard model

Toward a unified theory: an essay on the role of supergravity in the search for unification

Supersymmetry at 100 GeV

The family problem

Experimental Developments

Experiments to test unification schemes

The march toward higher energies

LAMPF II and the High-Intensity

The SSC - An engineering challenge

Science underground - the search for rare events

Personal Perspectives

Quarks and quirks among friends

Index

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