Fall 2007 - Elementary Particle Physics
UCSB Physics 225a and UCSD Physics 214
Mondays 2:00-3:20 and Wednesdays 2:00-3:20
UCSB: Kerr Hall Studio B
UCSD: CLICS, Room 260 Galbraith Hall
What this course is about
Welcome to the homepage of the 2nd joint UCSB/UCSD elementary particle physics class.
This is the first quarter of a two quarter sequence in elementary particle physics. This
course is intended to give the student a broad foundation in the phenomenology of
modern particle physics.
This is not intended to be a formal course in particle theory.
The emphasis is on the understanding of the basic
concepts as applied to real world situations and on doing simple calculations.
Most students will be concurrently taking a more formal course in field theory.
The expectation is that the field theory course will serve as
a more formal complement to the treatment given in this class.
No previous background in particle physics is assumed. Understanding of quantum
mechanics at the graduate level would be very helpful, but undergraduate quantum
mechanics would suffice.
Instructors
Lectures are given by Professor Wuerthwein from UCSD. Professor Richman is the
contact person at UCSB. Contact information is
given below.
| Who |
Office |
Phone |
email |
im |
Office Hours |
| Frank Wuerthwein |
Mayer 3306 (UCSD) |
Phone: 885 822-3219 |
fkw at ucsd dot edu |
fkw888 at aim |
Monday after class (or anytime you can find him) |
| Jeff Richman |
Broida 5112 (UCSB) |
Phone: 805 893-8408 |
richman at hep dot ucsb dot edu |
xxxx |
xxxx |
Announcements
Announcements are usually sent out via email and archived here.
Syllabus
First Quarter
- General Introduction, Natural Units
- Lifetimes and branching fractions, partial widths, Breit-Wigner
- Interactions of particles with matter (very basic).
- Symmetries, Conservation Laws
- Group Theory for dummies
- Isospin, SU(3)flavor, quark model of hadrons
- Quarkonium discoveries
- Neutrino masses, mixing, and oscillations
- Electrodynamics of S=0 particles
- Cross-sections
- Review of Dirac equation (if needed)
- Electrodynamics of S=1/2 particles (QED)
- Deep inelastic scattering, parton model
- Parton distribution functions, hadronic cross-sections
- QCD corrections, scaling violations, Altarelli-Parisi equation (may
need to go in 2nd quarter)
Second Quarter
- Fermi Theory, V-A
- Intermediate Vector Boson idea
- GIM Mechanism
- Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking, Goldstone Bosons, Higgs Bosons
- Electroweak Theory, SU(2)xU(1)
- Precision electroweak tests
- Standard Model Higgs Phenomenology: mass, naturalness, production
mechanisms, decay modes, experimental prospects
- Mixing and CP violation (K, D, and B systems)
- Taking a stroll through the dominant standard model processes at the LHC
- new physics that might hit us within the first 100pb-1 of LHC data
Textbook
The textbook is
Quarks and Leptons: An Introductory Course in Modern Particle Physics by Halzen and Martin.
This is an excellent book at about the right level for this course. The main problem
with it is that it is 20 years old, so many of the new developments in particle physics
are missing. We will provide additional material to supplement it.
In addition, we recommend that you obtain a copy of the
Review of Particle Physics. This includes
a comprehensive compilation
of data on particle physics as well as short review articles and
miscellaneous other useful stuff. The Review of Particle Physics
is published
every two years (on even years). It can be obtained for free
from the Particle Data Group (PDG).
(At the moment the website says that the 2006 version will be
available in the near future. However we know that they
have already started to distribute copies to their long time
subscribers). While you wait for the PDG to send your very own copy,
you may be able to borrow an older copy from your instructor (just ask).
Note also that the content of the Review of Particle Physics is also
available online from the PDG website.
Other books that you might find useful include (these are on reserve at Science and Engineering library at UCSD):
These will be added as time goes on. Please chack this section of
the web page often.
Whenever possible we provide links that can be
accessed without passwords or subscriptions. Unfortunately this
is not always possible, since sometime the only available link
is to the electronic version of the journal where the paper
was published. For copyright reasons we are not
allowed to post these papers directly on our website.
However, UCSB and UCSD have electronic subscriptions to most Physics
journals, and if you work on a machine with a ucsb.edu or ucsd.edu
domain you should be able to get to the paper without any
problem. If you are trying to access the paper from home, while
logged on through a commercial ISP, you may encounter
problems. However, if you are a UCSB student there
are ways to setup your browser to circumvent these issues,
see the instructions posted
here.
Lecture Notes
We are promised the technical capability for me to put ppt file on the screen, and write on top of it,
saving pages whenever I am filling them up. All of my scribbling is supposedly preserved for posterity.
Assuming this technology works, I will be uploading transparencies before and after each lecture.
I.e., with and without my scribbles.
As a complement to the normal lectures, we will have each student
give one roughly 30min presentation. This presentation will contribute
20% to your grade. The remainder is 30% homework, and 50% for the take-home final.
These presentations will happen either Tuesday or Thursday late afternoon.
You should think of these as serious mini research projects, documented by a talk
instead of a term paper. I will want to review each presentation at least one week prior
to it being given.
There are 7 students registered at UCSD, and 2 at UCSB. I've listed 12 topics below, thus
giving you some choice.
Student talks November 27th 2007:
Student talks November 29th 2007:
- ATLAS and CMS, the LHC detectors at the high energy frontier. (Reza Farsian)
I would expect here a brief overview of the detector concepts, followed by the
main performance characteristics, e.g. momentum resolution for electrons, pions, muons;
efficiencies for electrons,pions muons; photon energy resolution; jet energy resolution; MET resolution.
You should try to explain to us where the experiments differ in capability, and why they might have made the
choices they have made. I'd expect you to explain why muons and electrons have so drastically
different resolution functions as a function of particle momenta.
This talk is followed by more detailed talks that explain the main components.
- Central Tracking Detectors and track reconstruction at Atlas and CMS. You should review the
central trackers in ATLAS and CMS, and review track reconstruction in general. This includes explaining
where the resolution curve comes from, i.e. what are the competing terms.
- Calorimetry at Atlas and CMS (Mauricio Romo)
You should review the basic concepts of calorimetry, e.g.
Moliere radius, interaction length, radiation length, and discuss the difference in response to jets in the
CMS and Atlas calorimeter, and how this crucially affects their respective resolutions.
- Review the cross section of standard model proceses at LHC energies (Erik Jonsson) as well as the CMS trigger
strategy. This includes both a high level summary, as well as some detailed discussion of the main trigger
objects at Level1 and HLT. The background reading to this is the HLT trigger exercise performed in CMSSW 1_3,
as well as the CSA07 trigger path, and appendix to the physics TDR.
- Muon Detection at CMS: (Chris Justus) You should review the muon system at CMS, and discuss the main sources of
fake muons, as well as strategies to identify muons from W boson decay, and techniques to estimate
the W+jets background in dilepton final states, e.g. from WW production followed by leptonic decays of the Ws.
This ought to include a study on CMS Monte Carlo data to quantify the relative importance of punch-through,
and decay-in-flight, as well as backgrounds to leptons from Ws due to heavy flavor production and decay.
This should not be attempted by a student with weak software and computing skills.
- Review of photons faking electrons This is a Monte Carlo study of CMS single photon simulation
to understand, and then present, the issues around photons faking electrons due to conversions. You will
need to explain the physics of conversions, and show to what extend those fake electrons in he CMS detector.
You ought to develop strategies to suppress fake electrons from conversions.
This should not be attempted by a student with weak software and computing skills.
- Jet and MET calibration and reconstruction (Warren Andrews)
Review the CDF NIM paper that describes the Jet Energy Calibration for Run II.
- Review of dark matter detection techniques, and present status of their sensitivity: Alexey Vlasenko.
Start with the DMSAG report, and the references therin. Make sure you cover a comparison of detection
of cosmic dark matter with accelerator based searches. Are they sensitive to the same things?
How would one establish that a dark matter candidate observed at the LHC is indeed the source of the
dark matter in the universe?
- Review of Dark Energy detection techniques, and present status thereof: (John Saunders) Start with DETF report,
explain the experimental evidence so far, and review the different strategies for the future.
This is a difficult talk to give because we do not cover the basics for this science in this course.
You thus have to be careful to review the basics as well.
- Review of experimental inputs to our knowledge of pdf's for LHC We will discuss in class
the definition of parton density functions, and I will point you to a web page (assuming I can find it again)
that allows one to plot pdfs. In this talk, I want an assessment of the uncertainty in the "parton-parton"
luminosity as a function of sqrt(s) given the uncertainties in the pdfs we have today. This does require
some software work, and maybe is an inappropriate topic for this class. Will need to think about this some more.
- Review physics reach of Tevatron vs LHC for beyond the standard model physics. I expect you to sift through the CMS physics TDR vol. 2, as well as the CDF, and D0 analysis results web pages, and put together
a review of the respective reach. The question to answer: How much lumninosity does CMS need to exceed the reach
of the Tevatron in new physics searches for a variety of topics of your choice, or better for which you have
information available.
- topic 12: I welcome suggestions.
Grading will be based on the final (50%) and the homework (30%), and your talk (20%). The
date and time of the take-home final will be announced later.
Homework
UCSD students should place their homeworks in my mailbox.
in Mayer Hall. UCSB students should scan their homeworks into pdf files
and email them to me.
Graded homeworks will be returned in class (for UCSD students) or
mailed back (for UCSB students).
Solutions to the homework will be also posted on this page after the due date.