Description
Book SynopsisThe book aims to explain the historical development of particle physics, with special emphasis on CERN and collider physics. It describes in detail the LHC accelerator and its detectors, describing the science involved as well as the sociology of big collaborations, culminating with the discovery of the Higgs boson. Readers are led step-by-step to understanding why we do particle physics, as well as the tools and problems involved in the field. It provides an insider's view on the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider.
Table of ContentsThe LHC in a Snapshot; The Main Design Ideas of the Accelerator; A Matter of Cooling; Small Historical Summary: Before Particle Physics; The Beginning of the Particle Century; Relativity: A Short Encounter with Einstein; The Strange Quantum World: Particles, Waves and Uncertainties; What is Antimatter?; The Particle Zoo; They are Neutral, They are Small: Let's Call Them Neutrinos; Some Order in the Zoo and Force Unification; Let's Break the Symmetry with the Higgs Boson; Searching for New Physics; A Short Story of CERN; Main Principles of Particle Detectors; The LHC Detectors; What are We Searching for in the World's Largest Collider?; How Data Collected at the LHC are Analysed; The Higgs Boson Discovery; The Computing Infrastructure and Technological Spinoffs; The Human Aspects of the Big Collider; The Experience of Some LHC Physicists; What About the Next Large Collider?;
