Get First-Hand Insight from a Contributor to the Standard Model of Particle Physics
Written by an award-winning former director-general of CERN and one of the world's leading experts on particle physics, Electroweak Interactions explores the concepts that led to unification of the weak and electromagnetic interactions. It provides the fundamental elements of the theory of compact Lie groups and their representations, enabling a basic understanding of the role of flavor symmetry in particle physics.
Understand Conceptual Elements of the Theory of Elementary Particles
The book begins with the identification of the weak hadronic current with the isotopic spin current, Yang-Mills theory, and the first electroweak theory of Glashow. It discusses spontaneous breaking of a global symmetry and a local symmetry, covering the Goldstone theorem, Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism, and the theory of Weinberg and Salam. The author then describes the theory of quarks, quark mixing, the Cabibbo angle, the Glashow-Iliopoulos-Maiani (GIM) mechanism, the theory of Kobayashi and Maskawa, six quark flavors, and CP violation.
Delve into Experimental Tests and Unresolved Problems
The author goes on to explore some phenomenological topics, such as neutral current interactions of neutrinos and CP violation in the neutral K-meson system. He also highlights how flavor-changing neutral current processes have emerged as probes to reveal the presence of new phenomena at energies not yet accessible with particle accelerators. The book concludes with an explanation of the expected properties of the Higgs boson and the methods adopted for its search. The predictions are also compared with relevant experimental results.
View the author's first book in this collection: Relativistic Quantum Mechanics: An Introduction to Relativistic Quantum Fields.
Industry Reviews
"Maiani's book Electroweak Interactions provides the essential information for a graduate student who wishes to learn about the electroweak sector of the standard model. The treatment, by one the key contributors to the field, is focused, physical, and authoritative."
-R. Keith Ellis, Director, Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology, Durham University
"This book offers an excellent introduction to the theory of elementary particles with particular emphasis on the electroweak sector. It will be immensely useful to students, both experimentalists and theorists. It is also a book that every teacher of particle physics will absolutely need.
When we teach the subject, we often make the mistake to start from the formal aspects of gauge theories, Lie algebras, or differential geometry. They are important and necessary, but we forget that the student does not always understand why we need all this heavy artillery. This book, in fact this series because the present volume is part of a trilogy, starts the other way around: it introduces the physical principles and the phenomenological facts that point unambiguously to the introduction of the formal aspects of field theory. They will be the subject of the following volume. In the present book, experimentalists will find everything they need to know and theorists will understand why they also need to read the following volume.
A book for every particle physicist."
-John Iliopoulos, Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris
"Electroweak Interactions by Luciano Maiani is an elegantly written graduate-level textbook, reviewing the unification of the weak and electromagnetic interactions that constitute the Standard Model of particle physics. Addressed to students familiar with relativistic quantum mechanics, it is also an excellent reference for active high energy physics (HEP) theorists and experimentalists, as well as teachers. It reconstructs a path that began with th
