By Ian J R Aitchison and Anthony J G Hey
CRC Press
Hardback: £82
The fourth edition of this well-established, highly regarded two-volume set continues to provide a fundamental introduction to advanced particle physics while incorporating new experimental results, especially in the areas of CP violation and neutrino oscillations. It offers an accessible and practical introduction to the three gauge theories included in the Standard Model of particle physics: QED, QCD and the Glashow-Salam-Weinberg (GSW) electroweak theory.
In the first volume, a new chapter on Lorentz transformations and discrete symmetries presents a simple treatment of Lorentz transformations of Dirac spinors. Along with updating experimental results, this edition also introduces Majorana fermions at an early stage, making the material suitable for a first course in relativistic quantum mechanics.
Covering much of the experimental progress made in the past 10 years, the second volume remains focused on QCD and the GSW electroweak theory – the two non-Abelian quantum gauge field theories of the Standard Model – and includes a new chapter on CP violation and oscillation phenomena. This new edition also discusses the exciting discovery of a boson with properties consistent with those of the Standard Model Higgs boson. It also updates many other topics, including jet algorithms, lattice QCD, effective Lagrangians, and three-generation quark mixing and the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix.
