• What are fundamental particles? How many are there? How do they interact? Such questions will be discussed with an historical perspective of the discovery of the fundamental particles.
• Concepts of stable and un-stable particles will be introduced.

         Suggested Readings :

• Quarks with Color and Flavor - S. Glashow, Sqientific American, Oct 1975
• Elementary Particles and Forces - C.Quigg, Scientific American, April 1985
• Introduction to Elementary Particles - David Griffith, Chapter 1.
• The High Energy Physics Tours (Links available from the Main page)
 

• The Standard Model of particle physics gives a good description of the fundamental constituents of matter and their interactions. These lectures will begin with a brief history of the development of the standard model.
• We will discuss the history of the discovery of the b-quarks, W and Z bosons - which were some of the particles predicted by the standard model.
• Electroweak interactions:
• CP violation
•  left handed neutrinos
• GIM mechanism
• CKM matrix
• Strong Interactions:
• quark confinement
• A pictorial representation of particle interactions known as "Feynman diagrams" will be introduced. Concepts of perturbation theory will be explained.
• We will discuss the role of the top quark within this model and why we expected it to exist.

         Suggested Readings :

• Introduction to Elementary Particles- David Griffith, Chapter 2.
•  Elementary Particles and Forces - C.Quigg, Scientific American, April 1985
• Upsilon Particle - L. Lederman, Scientific American, Oct 1978
• Particles with naked Beauty - N. Mistry, R. Poling, E. Thorndike, Scientific American, July 1983
• The Asymmetry between Matter and Antimatter - H.R. Quinn and M.S. Witherell , Scientific American, Oct 1998
• The High Energy Physics Tours (Links available from the Main Page)

• Accelerators are used as tools to create the fundamental particles in a laboratory. The present accelerators operate at extremely high energies. We will learn why we need these high energies and how we achieve these energies using different types of acceleration ideas - fixed target vs. collider principles.
• As a concrete example of how an accelerator works, we will use the Fermilab Tevatron, which is currently the highest energy accelerator in the world.
• We will discuss what happens during a "collision of a proton with an anti-proton". Some new concepts e.g. parton collisions, transverse momentum will be discussed.
• The concept of "luminosity" - the rate of data collection - will be introduced.

Suggested Reading :
• The next Generation of Particle Accelerators - R.R. Wilson, Scientific American, Jan 1980
• Introduction to Elementary Particles- David Griffith, Chapter 3. (Relativistic Kinematics).
• The Tevatron at Fermi National Accelerator Lab (Acclerator Tour)
• An overview of the ATLAS detector (From the ATLAS education page)
• Particle Data Group's : Experimental Methods and Colliders review

• Link to description on short project assignment (2/10/99)
• List of Accelerator complexes
• CERN
• DESY - follow the link to High Energy Physics Program
• CESR
• SLAC - (also link to SLC)
• A short description of these accelerators from the particle adventure web page

 

• Extremely large and complex detectors are needed to record the products of beam collisions in an accelerator. What criteria necessitate building these detectors which weigh about 5000 tons and are approximately 15 meters (3 stories) high ?
• To understand these questions we will discuss
• How different particles interact with matter.
• How detectors record and distinguish various particles.
• What different detection techniques are used in these large detectors.
• Here we will use the D0 and CDF detectors at the Fermilab Tevatron as examples of  high energy physics detectors. We will study the components of these detectors.
• To aid in discussion, different "events" from the data collected by the D0 detector will be used. These event pictures will help understand how we distinguish between different particles e.g. electrons, muons, jets (light quark vs. b-quark) in a detector.

• We will study the processes responsible for production of top quarks in a collision of protons with anti-protons at the Fermilab collider. Here we will use Feynman diagrams to illustrate the different underlying processes.
• The theoretical predictions for the probability of production ("cross section") of top quarks in these collisions will be discussed in order to establish how often we expect to see top quarks in the data collected by the detectors.
• The top quark is an un-stable particle - what does it decay into?
• How to we recognize that a "event" recorded by the detector is due to the creation of a top quark during the collision.
• Are there other processes which look just like the top quark ? These are known as "background processes". How do we discriminate between the "event" due to top quarks and "background processes".
• Computer Simulations of "top quark" and "background processes" will be used to show the different characteristics of the two types of "events".

• We will discuss the history of the search for and the discovery of the top quarks  during two decades (1977-1995).
• Techniques used to select the 30 top quark events from the 12 billion events recorded by the D0 and CDF detectors each will be discussed.
• In this part of the course, we will also learn about the importance of statistical data analysis techniques in the search for and discovery of fundamental particles.
• We will use the statistical analysis techniques to determine the "significance" of the results from both the experiments.

• Once a particle is discovered, the focus of the research turns to measuring the properties of the particle.
• The rate of production ("cross section") of top quark events in collisions of protons with anti-protons is a measure of our understanding of the features of the theory. If the experimental measurement deviates from the theoretical measurements, then it could lead to very interesting consequences : e.g. the theory could be wrong, or maybe some aspect of the theory could be modified to better understand the mechanism for top quark production.
• How do we measure the "rate of production" of top quarks? We will need to understand
• how the acceptance of the detector is measured.
• Also, how "efficiently" do we detect these particles.
• and how to measure the level of "background" in the sample of data.

•  Another extremely interesting property of the top quark is its mass. The mass of the quarks are free parameters in the theory of particle physics.
• This measurement is fairly complex but interesting.
• We will use the events from the D0 detector via the worldwide web to compute the mass of the top quark events as a project.

• What are the consequences of the "massiveness" of the top quark.
• What are the plans for measuring the cross section and the mass of the top quark with better precision
• Are there other properties of the top quark which can be measured? Where, when?