Femtophysics

Provides an account of what is now known about physics at scales of 1013 to 1016 cm. The existence of spin half quarks interacting through colour fields is established fact, as is the structure unifying electromagnetic and weak interaction. In Femtophysics, the author explains the evidence and communicates the essential physics underlying these recent and remarkable developments. The approach throughout is to obtain results by applying trivial algebra to the content of simple and clear physical pictures. Thus, abstract and difficult concepts can be mastered painlessly while maintaining a firm grip on the essentials. The diligent student, therefore, should acquire a comprehensive understanding of the principles underlying present day particle physics.

For undergraduates reading physics, graduate students working in experimental particle physics and university lecturers.

Chapter headings and selected papers: An Introduction. Why is particle physics high energy physics? Of Propagators and Pions. Virtual particles: annihilation and creation operators. Strangers in Town. Peculiarities of the weak interactions. Hadrons. Determination of hadron properties. Colour, Confinement and Strings. Chromomagnetism. Lepton Probes. Coulomb scattering and form factors. Golden Rules. Propagators and resonances. Fermions and the Dirac Equation. Fermions, antifermions and parity. Fermion-Fermion Interactions. Deep inelastic neutrino scattering. Probing the Nucleon. Weak neutral currents. SU(2) and Isopin. Charge conjugation and G parity. From SU(2) to SU(3) of colour: Chromodynamics of Hadrons. Chromomagnetism. Chromodynamics of Hadrons: Ground State Baryons and Isocalor Mesons. Isosinglet states, annihilation and flavour mixing. Massive Fermions. Chromomagnetic splitting in heavy quark systems. Weak Interactions of Quarks. The pattern of quark decay. The (un)Unified Electroweak Interaction. The Weinberg-Salam model-unexplained. Final remarks. Units. Glossary. Select Bibliography. Index.