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Updated:

July 31, 2013

Master student course "Particle Physics 1"

Last updated: August 7, 2021

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The Particle Physics 1 course is a 1-st year course on particle physics in the master program for experimental physics at the UvA and VUU. The course consists of 14 half-day lectures/tutorials and takes place at Nikhef. Course information can be found on canvas, datanose, and in the short document linked above.

The course covers an introduction to gauge theories and the standard model. The covered material can be found in several standard text books. The recommended book for this course is "Modern Particle Physics" by Mark Thomson. Older books, such as Halzen and Martin's "Quarks & Leptons: an Introductory Course in Modern Particle Physics" and in Griffiths' "Introduction to Elementary Particle Physics", second, revised edition, are fine as well. We strongly encourage students to acquire one of these books.

A write up of the course is available as lecture notes and slides (in progress). A printed copy of the notes will be handed out in the first lecture. The lecture notes consists of 14 chapters, each one consists of one lecures. Course exercises can also be found in the lecture notes. An older version of summary slides are here.

A short abstract of the course is given below.

The course Particle Physics 1 is a course on quantum electrodynamics and electroweak theory in the experimental master. It contains a single particle quantum mechanics treatment of perturbation theory leading to the Feynman rules of electromagnetic and electroweak interactions. The course starts with a discussion of wave equations for spinless particles followed by a Lorentz co-variant description of the electromagnetic field. A recap of non-relativistic perturbation theory leads to Fermi's golden rule, which is extended to the relativistic scattering and an example of an electromagnetic scattering process of spinless particles is calculated.
Example image - aligned to the right The second part of the course treats particles of spin=1/2: the fundamental fermions. The Dirac equation is derived and solutions are studied. The Feynman rules for fermions follow from the wave equations and the annihilation scattering process of an electron pair into a muon pair is calculated.
Subsequently the weak interaction is studied in analogy starting from the 4-point interaction model of Fermi. The V-A structure is discussed as well as the flavour changing aspects of the charged current interaction and the CKM matrix.
The final part of the course contains a discussion of the principle of local gauge invariance for electrodynamics as well as for electroweak interactions resulting from the Standard Model symmetry: SU(2) x U(1). The course concludes with the Born level calculation of the electroweak cross section of e+e- -> mu+ mu-process at the Z-pole and the observation of the number of neutrino generations by LEP-1.