Professor Manuel Drees

Lectures

SS 21:

Theoretical Particle Physics 2

Time and Place : Monday, 12:15 to 14:00,
                            Wednesday, 12:15 to 13:00; both times notionally (!) in HS 1, PI (i.e., in the big lecture room).

First Lecture: April 12, 2021.

Last Lecture: July 21, 2021.

Tutorials: To be decided in the first week of lectures.
First session : The second week of classes.
The assignment sheets can be downloaded here.
Figures shown in class can be found here.
The identities with two-component spinors etc can be found here .

The lecture is aimed at students interested in experimental and/or theoretical particle physics. Prior knowledge of relativistic quantum mechanics, and the Standard Model of particle physics (as covered, e.g., in the Theoretical Particle Physics 1 class) will be assumed. I will occasionally use results from Quantum Field Theory, but one should be able to follow this class without having taken lectures in Quantum Field Theory first. (Of course, everybody interested in particle theory should take the QFT classes, too!)

Only students who solve at least 50% of the homework problems of this class will be allowed to participate in the final exam!

Currently regular lectures still cannot take place. For the time being the lectures will therefore only be held electronically, via the eCampus system. In order to access the content, you first need to register for this course. Registration should be open as of now (April 7). All holders of a university ID (hence a university e-mail address) should be able to register for this course.
In order to access the content, click on "Contents of the lecture" on the eCampus site for this lecture (physics636), next to the cloud symbol. There you find two kinds of files for the lecture, i.e. four files per week. The PDF files are just static files, containing something like a manuscript of the lecture, partly typed, partly in handwriting. The mp4 files show how the PDF files were written, i.e. they show "videos" (only of the "sheet of paper", not of me!), plus voice commentary. This roughly corresponds to what you would have seen on the blackboard, and heard, in a regular lecture. Of course, the mp4 files are much bigger; also, you need an mp4 player to play them. I'm using smplayer (on Ubuntu Linux), which works fine, many other players should work as well. (The standard Windows player works at well, at least on my laptop.) The homework problems should also be accessible via the same link.


The lecture covers extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics. More specifically, the following topics will be covered:
1) Neutrino oscillations and neutrino masses
2) Grand Unification of the gauge interactions
3) Supersymmetry

Literature:
G. Ross, Grand Unified Theories, discusses both supersymmetric and non-supersymmetric GUTs.
Drees, Godbole and Roy, Theory and Phenomenology of Sparticles, gives an in-depth treatment of supersymmetry, with emphasis on phenomenological aspects.
Baer, Tata, Weak scale supersymmetry: From superfields to scattering events, is similar in scope to the previous book, but uses a different notation.
S. Martin, A Supersymmetry Primer (on the arXiv), offers a down-to-earth introduction to supersymmetry.
Peskin and Schroeder, An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory, treats the underlying formalism, but also contains many particle physics applications.

Weekly Theoretical High Energy Physics seminar

Master and Doctoral Theses