Fundamentals of Particle Physics

Pascal Paganini is a professor at the École Polytechnique near Paris and researcher at CNRS, where he has lectured for many years on particle physics for undergraduate and graduate students. As an experimental particle physicist, he has engaged in several experiments at CERN, including the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. More recently, he has been involved in the Super-Kamiokande neutrino experiment in Japan, and designing its next-generation successor, Hyper-Kamiokande.

Preface; Notation and Constants; 1. Particle physics landscape; 2. Preliminary concepts: special relativity and quantum mechanics; 3. Collisions and decays; 4. Conservation rules and symmetries; 5. From wave functions to quantum fields; 6. A brief overview of quantum electrodynamics; 7. From hadrons to partons; 8. Quantum Chromodynamics; 9. Weak interaction; 10. Electroweak interaction; 11. Electroweak symmetry breaking; 12. The Standard Model and beyond; Appendix A. Elements of group theory for particle physics; Appendix B. Special Unitary group SU(2); Appendix C. Special Unitary group SU(3) and SU(N); Appendix D. Lorentz and Poincaré groups; Appendix E. Calculating with the Dirac delta distribution; Appendix F. Contour integration in the complex plane; Appendix G. Useful formulas with γ matrices; Appendix H. Fermi's golden rule and time dependent perturbation; References; Index.