by G Kane and A Pierce (eds), World Scientific. Hardback ISBN 9789812779755, $99/£55. Paperback ISBN 9789812833891, $54/£30. E-book ISBN 9789812779762, $129.
This book could hardly seem more timely, with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) having started operations and new discoveries being eagerly awaited (but quite possibly a few years off yet). It consists of 17 chapters, each on a different topic, ranging from a description of the detectors to discussions of naturalness in quantum-field theories of particle physics.
The contributors are particle physicists, several of whom are prominent in the field. However, each chapter has different authors, so the result is inevitably a little patchy. The chapters differ widely in scope, in character and in the level of expertise assumed for the reader. For instance, the chapter on dark matter at the LHC is very basic and could be read by undergraduates, whereas the informative chapter on top physics is of a graduate level. There are also some much more general expansive essays, such as one that explores similarities between the BCS theory of superconductivity and particle physics, and the introductory chapter. The introduction assumes a fair amount of prior knowledge and is much too optimistic for my taste about the chance of discovering supersymmetry at the LHC. The author asserts that supersymmetry must be correct because of several pieces of circumstantial evidence, but I really think that other such a posteriori scraps could be used to prop up the evidence for competing theories.
There are a couple of obvious omissions, for example quark-gluon plasma physics and the ALICE detector. After all, the LHC will spend some of its time providing collisions between heavy ions, rather than protons, and ALICE will be trying to divine the properties of the resulting soup of quarks and gluons. The other missing topic is that of diffractive physics. It is likely that both the ATLAS and CMS experiments will eventually have forward detectors to measure protons that have just grazed another one in a collision. Under certain theoretical circumstances, it is even possible to produce Higgs bosons in the central detector during these collisions. Such rare events could provide useful experimental constraints on the properties of Higgs bosons. The chapter about the ATLAS and CMS detectors is welcome, but it could benefit from some basics about how particles interact as they travel through matter. This important link in the logical chain is missing from the discussion.
Perspectives on LHC Physics is a timely, heterogeneous offering, with some interesting gems and informative parts, as well as some fairly off-the-wall speculation. I think that there should be sections of it to interest most readers in the physical sciences, but that they may well wish to choose particular chapters to read. Luckily, the format of the book makes this easy to achieve.
