by Jiri Horejsi, Charles University Prague, The Karolinum Press. ISBN 8024606399, €50 ($50).
This book is an introduction to electroweak theory at the graduate-student level. The first 100 or so pages are dedicated to the old weak interaction theory, from Enrico Fermi to Nicola Cabibbo. The remainder of the book then goes on to describe the modern standard gauge theory of electroweak interactions.
Overall, I had a favourable impression on reading this book. The main qualities are clarity, formal simplicity and a good sense of physics. Tree-level unitarity constraints and the good behaviour of amplitudes at large energies are often used as guiding principles for the discussion of Standard Model couplings. A number of exercises are proposed at the end of each chapter.
One drawback is the absence of an adequate discussion of the experimental tests of electroweak theory and, in general, of the phenomenological aspects that are currently of interest. There is not even a summary or any basic calculations about the properties of the W, the Z and the Higgs particles. One or two further chapters on modern collider physics, covering the past 20 years of electroweak phenomenology, would provide a useful completion to this book.
