PHY1810F:
Foundations of Particle Physics

Office hours

Office hours on Monday and Tuesday before the exam: 11:00-13:00

Syllabus

Overview of the standard model (see also PDG website)

particles; gauge forces, Feynman diagrams, four-fermi theory and weak interactions; experiments: concepts of colliders, cross sections, resonances, examples;

Canonical quantization of field theory

failure of single-particle quantum mechanics; Lagrangian formulation of classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, classical field theory, quantum field theory; canonical quantization, review of simple harmonic oscillator, creation and annihilation operators, free Klein-Gordon theory, field expansion;

Symmetries and conservation laws

Noether's theorem in field theory: example of energy-momentum tensor; Goldstone's Theorem; internal symmetries: example U(1) and antiparticles; C,P,T.; cultural intro to group theory: Lie groups, concept of spin of a field, representations of Lorentz group;

Scattering theory, Feynman Diagrams

Dyson's formula, Wick's theorem; diagrammatic perturbation theory for scalar field theory; examples;

Cross-sections, phase space, decay rates

examples from scalar QFT;

Spin 1/2 fields, Dirac Lagrangian

Weyl Lagrangian; Dirac Lagrangian, Dirac matrices, chirality; spin-statistics theorem; perturbation theory for spinor-scalar coupling;

Vector fields and QED

spin 1 fields; quantization of massive vector fields; massless limit and gauge invariance; QED and examples; massive vector bosons and weak interactions: effective four-fermi theory, SLAC experiment and neutral currents; concept of renormalizability, non-renormalizability of massive vector bosons.

Texts

The recommended textbook for this course is An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory by M. Peskin and D. Schroeder. Copies are on sale at the UofT Bookstore. This text will also be used in the Spring course on Quantum Field Theory, PHY2404S. We will only use about the first five chapters in this course.

In addition, Prof. M. Luke, who taught a similar Quantum Field Theory course last year, has kindly agreed to make available his TeXed course notes, which are based on a course taught by S. Coleman at Harvard. A 2.66MB PostScript file of the notes is available here .

Other potentially useful introductory texts on reserve in the Physics and Main Libraries are Quantum Field Theory, by Ryder (especially the first four chapters), Quantum Field Theory by Mandl and Shaw, and Gauge Theories in Particle Physics, by Aitchison and Hey (selected parts).

Assessment

The final grade will be 60% on the homeworks, and 40% on the final exam.

Five homework assignments will be given during the term. They will be due on 10/04, 10/27, 11/15, 11/24 and 12/08. Each late homework will get an automatic penalty of 10%, but will be accepted until solutions are handed out a week after the due date.

• Homework 1
• Homework 2
• Homework 3
• Homework 4
• Homework 5

The date of the final exam is Wednesday 13th December 2000, from 09:30-12:30, in room MP408. The format of the exam will be three hours in-class, and you may bring in one sheet of paper with normal-size (un-reduced) text/equations on both sides.

For other important deadlines and dates, see the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Calendar .