Course Information

Course Information

In this web page we provide the syllabus of the course Elementary Particles and Fundamental Forces, offered by the Department of Physics.

The list of the courses offered during the current accademic year is available here. 

The list of all courses offered by the Department of Physics is available here.

Code Φ-422
Title Elementary Particles and Fundamental Forces
Category B
ECTS 6
Hours 4
Level Undergraduate
Semester Spring
Teacher Dr. Who
Program

Wednesday, 13:00-15:00, Seminar Room, 1st Floor
Thursday, 15:00-17:00, Seminar Room, 1st Floor
Friday, 13:00-15:00, Seminar Room, 1st Floor
Course Webpage
Goal of the Course

The course is addressed to third year physics students. It is recommended that students have prior knowledge of the material covered in the course of the courses Modern Physics I and II (Φ-201, Φ-202), Quantum Mechanics I (Φ-303) as well as mathematics. The course expands upon the introduction on the physics of elementary particles presented in Φ-202.
Syllabus

- Brief historical introduction in the elementary particles, the carriers of forces, and principles of relativistic kinematics
- Symmetries, groups, conservation laws, angular momentum, spin, isotopic spin, Internal symmetries. Angular momentum commutation and group representation. Selection rules, charge parity, time reversibility
- Quarks, positronium, quarkonium, mesons, and baryons. Masses and magnetic moments of baryons.
- Fermi's golden rule. Feynman rules for cross sections and lifetimes of particles. The Dirac equation and its solutions. Gauge theories and a brief introduction to the quantum electrodynamics. Examples of scattering calculations. Introduction to quantum chromodynamics. The concept of asymptotic freedom.
- Model of Fermi and the transformations of muons and neutrinos.
- The theorem of Goldstone and the Higgs mechanism. A brief introduction to the "standard model" of electroweak interactions and applications to simple processes of scattering and other reactions.
Bibliography

“Introduction to Elementary Particles”, David Griffiths (Wiley-VCH 2004) 
“Introduction to High Energy Physics”, D.H. Perkins (Addison-Wesley, 1982) 
“Concepts of Particle Physics”, K. Gottfried and V.F. Weisskopf (Oxford Univ. Press, 1984) 
“Quarks and Leptons”, F. Halzen and A.D. Martin (Wiley, 1984) 
“Εισαγωγή στη Φυσική Στοιχειωδών Σωµατίων”, Ι. Βέργαδος, Παν. Ιωαννίνων, 1985