Description
Book SynopsisThis lively well-illustrated collection of articles written by a group of particle physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory presents to the expert and non-expert alike a comprehensive overview of the major theoretical and experimental advances of the past twenty years. It explains the emergence of a profoundly new understanding of the fundamental forces of Nature. With the unification of the weak and electromagnetic interaction, physicists now stand at the brink of a complete unification of all the forces, including gravity. This achievement brought with it a rich vocabulary of names and concepts: quarks, gluons and nonabelian gauge theories. The exposition of these ideas, done on a variety of technical levels is designed to interest a broad audience ranging from the professional theorist and experimentalist to the inquisitive student. Anyone with an interest in particle physics can enjoy this book.
Table of ContentsPreface; Introduction; Part I. Theoretical Framework: 1. Scale and dimension - From animals to quarks Geoffrey B. West; 2. Particle physics and the standard model Stuart Raby, Richard C. Slansky and Geoffrey B. West; QCD on a Cray: the masses of elementary particles Gerald Guralnik, Tony Warnock and Charles Zemach; Lecture Notes - From simple field theories to the standard model; 3. Toward a unified theory: an essay on the role of supergravity in the search for unification Richard C. Slansky; 4. Supersymmetry at 100 GeV Stuart Raby; 5. The family problem T. Goldman and Michael Martin Nieto; Part II. Experimental Developments: 6. Experiments to test unification schemes Gary H. Sanders; 7. The march toward higher energies S. Peter Rosen; LAMPF II and the High-Intensity Frontier Henry A. Thiessen; The SSC - An engineering challenge Mahlon T. Wilson; 8. Science underground - the search for rare events L. M. Simmons, Jr; Part III. Personal Perspectives: 9. Quarks and quirks among friends Peter A. Carruthers, Stuart Raby, Richard C. Slansky, Geoffrey B. West and George Zweig; Index.
