Fundamentals of Particle Physics: Understanding the Standard Model, by Pascal Paganini, Cambridge University Press
This textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, written by experimental particle-physicist Pascal Paganini of Ecole Polytechnique, aims to teach Standard Model calculations of quantities that are relevant for modern experimental research. Each chapter ends with a collection of unsolved problems to help the student practice the discussed calculations. The level is similar to the well-known textbook Quarks and Leptons by F Halzen and A D Martin (Wiley, 1984), but with a broader introduction and including more up-to-date material. The notation is also similar, and shared with several other popular textbooks at the same level, making it easy for students to use it along with other resources.
Comprehensive
Fundamentals of Particle Physics starts with a general introduction that is around 50 pages long and includes information on detectors and statistics. It continues with a recap of relativistic kinematics, quantum mechanics of angular momentum and spin, phase–space calculations for cross sections and decays as well as symmetries. The main part of the book begins with a discussion of relativistic quantum mechanics, covering the equations of motion of spin 0, 1 and ½ particles along with a detailed description of Dirac spinors and their properties. Then, it addresses quantum electrodynamics (QED), including the QED Lagrangian, standard QED cross-section calculations and a section dedicated to magnetic moments (g-2). About 100 pages are devoted to hadronic physics: deep inelastic scattering, parton model, parton-distribution functions and quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Calculations in perturbative QCD are discussed in some detail and there is also an accessible section in non-perturbative QCD that can serve as a very nice introduction to beginner graduate students.
The book continues with weak interactions, covering the Fermi theory, W-boson exchange, CKM matrix, neutrinos, neutrino mixing and CP-violation. The following chapter presents the electroweak theory and introduces gauge-boson interactions. A dedicated chapter is reserved for the Higgs boson. This includes a nice section about the discovery of the particle and the measurements that are performed at the LHC, as well as some comments about the pre-history (LEP and Tevatron) and the future (HL-LHC and FCC). A clear discussion about naturalness and several other conceptual issues offers a light and useful read for students of any level. The final chapter goes through the Standard Model as a whole, including a very useful evaluation of its successes and weaknesses. In terms of beyond-Standard Model physics, only dark matter and neutrino masses are covered.
Although this is not a quantum field-theory textbook, some of its elements are introduced; in particular second quantisation, S-matrix, Dyson’s expansion and a few words about renormalisation are included. These are very useful in bridging the gap between practical calculations and their theoretical background, also serving as a quick reference.
There are several useful appendices, most notably a 30-page introduction to group theory that can serve as a guide for a short standalone course in the subject or as a quick reference. The book also includes elements of the Lagrangian formalism, which could have been a bit more expanded to include a more detailed presentation of Noether’s theorem, probably in an additional appendix.
Overall the book achieves a good balance between calculations and more conceptual discussions. All students in the field can benefit from the sections on the Higgs-boson discovery and the Standard Model. Being concise and not too long, Fundamentals of Particle Physics can easily be used as a primary or secondary textbook for a particle-physics course that introduces calculations using Feynman diagrams in the Standard Model to students.
