A fascinating tour of particle physics from Nobel Prize winner Leon Lederman. At the root of particle physics is an invincible sense of curiosity. Leon Lederman embraces this spirit of inquiry as he moves from the Greeks' earliest scientific observations to Einstein and beyond to chart this unique arm of scientific study. His survey concludes with the Higgs boson, nicknamed the God Particle, which scientists hypothesize will help unlock the last secrets of the subatomic universe, quarks and all--it's the dogged pursuit of this almost mystical entity that inspires Lederman's witty and accessible history.
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This first open access volume of the handbook series contains articles on the standard model of particle physics, both from the theoretical and experimental perspective. It also covers related topics, such as heavy-ion physics, neutrino physics and searches for new physics beyond the standard model. A joint CERN-Springer initiative, the "Particle Physics Reference Library" provides revised and updated contributions based on previously published material in the well-known Landolt-Boernstein series on particle physics, accelerators and detectors (volumes 21A, B1,B2,C), which took stock of the field approximately one decade ago. Central to this new initiative is publication under full open access
The recent observation of the Higgs boson has been hailed as the scientific discovery of the century and led to the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics. This book describes the detailed science behind the decades-long search for this elusive particle at the Large Electron Positron Collider at CERN and at the Tevatron at Fermilab and its subsequent discovery and characterization at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Written by physicists who played leading roles in this epic search and discovery, this book is an authoritative and pedagogical exposition of the portrait of the Higgs boson that has emerged from a large number of experimental measurements. As the first of its kind, this book should be of interest to graduate students and researchers in particle physics.
The 4th San Miniato Topical Seminar on “The Standard Model and Just Beyond” was a continuation of the meetings held in 1985, 1987 and 1991, and covered essentially similar topics. The program focused on reviews of the present experimental progress in precise electroweak and QCD tests, heavy flavour physics (particularly mixing) and the search for new particles. The emphasis was on the most recent results coming from the large statistics data samples collected at LEP, other e+e- machines, hadron colliders and fixed target experiments. The present status of the theory was reviewed and one session was dedicated to the discussion of future plans and physics issues.
This book investigates the physics of the discovered Higgs boson and additional Higgs bosons in the extended Higgs models which includes higher-order quantum corrections. While the 125 GeV Higgs boson was discovered, the structure of the Higgs sector is still a mystery. Since the Higgs sector determines the concrete realization of the Higgs mechanism, the study of its nature is one of the central interests in current and future high-energy physics. The book begins with a review of the standard model and the two-Higgs doublet model, which is one of the representatives of the extended Higgs models. Subsequently, we discuss the studies of the two-Higgs doublet model at the lowest order of perturbation. Following the lowest-order analysis, we study the higher-order electroweak corrections in Higgs physics. After reviewing the renormalization procedure and the higher-order corrections in the decays of the discovered Higgs boson, we discuss the higher-order corrections in the Higgs strahlung process from an electron-positron collision, the decays of the additional charged and CP-odd Higgs bosons in the two-Higgs doublet model. From the series of these studies, it is found that the nature of the Higgs sector can be widely investigated by future collider experiments.
This book describes the first application at CMS of deep learning algorithms trained directly on low-level, “raw” detector data, or so-called end-to-end physics reconstruction. Growing interest in searches for exotic new physics in the CMS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN has highlighted the need for a new generation of particle reconstruction algorithms. For many exotic physics searches, sensitivity is constrained not by the ability to extract information from particle-level data but by inefficiencies in the reconstruction of the particle-level quantities themselves. The technique achieves a breakthrough in the reconstruction of highly merged photon pairs that are completely unresolved in the CMS detector. This newfound ability is used to perform the first direct search for exotic Higgs boson decays to a pair of hypothetical light scalar particles H→aa, each subsequently decaying to a pair of highly merged photons a→yy, an analysis once thought impossible to perform. The book concludes with an outlook on potential new exotic searches made accessible by this new reconstruction paradigm.
"The Higgs boson ... is the key to understanding why mass exists and how atoms are possible. After billions of dollars and decades of effort by more than six thousand researchers at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland--a doorway is opening into the mind-boggling world of dark matter and beyond. Caltech physicist and acclaimed writer Sean Carroll explains both the importance of the Higgs boson and the ultimately human story behind the greatest scientific achievement of our time"--Publisher
A useful scientific theory, claimed Einstein, must be explicable to any intelligent person. In Deep Down Things, experimental particle physicist Bruce Schumm has taken this dictum to heart, providing in clear, straightforward prose an elucidation of the Standard Model of particle physics -- a theory that stands as one of the crowning achievements of twentieth-century science. In this one-of-a-kind book, the work of many of the past century's most notable physicists, including Einstein, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, Feynman, Gell-Mann, and Weinberg, is knit together in a thorough and accessible exposition of the revolutionary notions that underlie our current view of the fundamental nature of the physical world. Schumm, who has spent much of his life emmersed in the subatomic world, goes far beyond a mere presentation of the "building blocks" of matter, bringing to life the remarkable connection between the ivory tower world of the abstract mathematician and the day-to-day, life-enabling properties of the natural world. Schumm leaves us with an insight into the profound open questions of particle physics, setting the stage for understanding the progress the field is poised to make over the next decade or two. Introducing readers to the world of particle physics, Deep Down Things opens new realms within which are many clues to unraveling the mysteries of the universe.
The Higgs Hunter's Guide is a definitive and comprehensive guide to the physics of Higgs bosons. In particular, it discusses the extended Higgs sectors required by those recent theoretical approaches that go beyond the Standard Model, including supersymmetry and superstring-inspired models.
