Physics 721 - Fall 2017

Subatomic Physics

Contact Information
Goals and Preparation Required
Learning Outcomes (includes Syllabus)
Course Policies and Classwork
Methods of Evaluation
Course Content
Course Schedule

Contact Information

Lectures: TTh 10:05 AM - 11:20 AM
Lecture Room: PSC 409
Professor: Prof. Milind V. Purohit
Office: PSC 404c
Office Hours: Wed 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM, PSC 404c
Home Page: "Milind V. Purohit's Home Page"

Goals and Preparation

The goal of this course is to present particle and nuclear physics to physics graduate students unfamiliar with the subjects. This course is a survey course designed to cover the subject from an experimentalist's point of view. After taking this course and the second in the sequence, PHYS 723, students should feel confident about starting research in nuclear or particle physics. Ideally students should conclude with a third semester course which is specialized to either nuclear or particle physics.

Students are expected to know electromagnetic theory and quantum mechanics at the graduate level (PHYS 703, 704, 711, 712) before they take this course. Only students who have done well in PHYS 711/712 should take this course. They should also have taken undergraduate courses in modern physics and nuclear / particle physics.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the term, successful students should be able to do the following:


Methods of Evaluation

Students are evaluated through the semester using classwork, homework, and projects. Classwork will count for 20% of the grade, homework for 50%, and projects for 30%. Typically there will be two or more simple homework problems every week. Occasional software projects will be assigned.

Challenging problems will occasionally be assigned to help students truly master the subject material. The project will typically be a computing-based assignment related to the course material. Students will be expected to know and use either Python or C++, and to write up their assignments using LaTeX. [These tools are standard in subatomic physics research.] All homework and projects should be submitted on paper; electronic submissions are not allowed.

Homework and projects are both due on Thu. of the following week (from when they are assigned). Homework may be submitted up to one week late for 50% points; after that late homework will not receive any points. Note that on-time homework and project submission is taken very seriously since there are no exams, and students are expected to treat on-time submission with full seriousness.

Students who do reasonably well in the simple homeworks and in the projects can expect to get a B. Those who do very well will get a B+. Those who, in addition to the regular homework and projects, also do the challenging problems successfully can expect to get an A. Students with unexcused absences, late attendance, disruptive classroom behavior and / or or who do not submit homeworks (even a few missing homeworks) or do poorly on all assignments will be assigned a grade of C, D or F depending on the degree of non-performance.

Attendance: Mandatory!
Post-candidacy students who need to be away for research must get their advisors to contact me with the dates of their absence. Unexcused and / or excessive absences will lead to a lower grade.


Course Content:

The course content is derived from a variety of sources, including the texts below. Texts:
Griffiths, David. "Introduction to Elementary Particles", 2nd Revised Edition, WILEY-VCH, New York (2010). ISBN: 978-3-527-40601-2.
Perkins, D. H. "Introduction to High Energy Physics", 4th edition, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Menlo Park, CA (2000). Cambridge Univ Press. ISBN: 0521621968
Henley, Ernest M. and Garcia, Alejandro "Subatomic Physics", 3rd Edition, World Scientific Publishing Company, 2007.

Note: This course is preparation for research and there is not, emphatically not, a single text we can follow. Such is the nature of research. Einstein once said "If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" Thus, you should expect to get referred to journal publications, to chapters from other texts, to websites, to the particle data book, and to other sources.

For instance, Griffiths's text does not explain much, if anything, about experimental aspects (accelerators and detectors), and also about nuclear physics (structure of nuclei and scattering from nuclei).

We begin with a historical introduction to particle physics, outlining major experimental and theoretical development of the field in the 1900's and projecting expectations for upcoming experiments this century. We also review special relativity and quantum mechanics, and introduce accelerators and detectors. We continue with order-of-magnitude estimates of the different forces between two quarks, the basic Feynman diagrams and symmetries and conservation laws including angular momentum conservation and its applications using Clebsch-Gordan coefficients. We then study a little group theory and apply its principles to the quark model of hadrons. The course concludes with an exploration of quantum electrodynamics (QED).



Detailed Course Schedule



This page is maintained by "Milind V. Purohit"