Introduction to Nuclear and Particle Physics
The phenomenology and experimental foundations of particle and nuclear physics; the fundamental forces and particles, composites. Interactions of particles with matter, and detectors. SU(2), SU(3), models of mesons and baryons. QED, weak interactions, parity violation, lepton-nucleon scattering, and structure functions. QCD, gluon field and color. W and Z fields, electro-weak unification, the CKM matrix. Nucleon-nucleon interactions, properties of nuclei, single- and collective- particle models. Electron and hadron interactions with nuclei. Relativistic heavy ion collisions, and transition to quark-gluon plasma.
Fall 2020
This is an introductory graduate-level course on the phenomenology and experimental foundations of nuclear and particle physics, including the fundamental forces and particles, as well as composites. Emphasis is on the experimental establishment of the leading models, and the theoretical tools and experimental apparatus used to establish them.
Readings
- Perkins, Donald H. Introduction to High Energy Physics . Cambridge University Press, 2014. ISBN: 9780521621960
- Wong, Samuel S. M. Introductory Nuclear Physics . Prentice-Hall, 1990. ISBN: 9780134715667
- Griffiths, David J. Introduction to Elementary Particles . Wiley-VCH, 2017. ISBN: 9783527406012
- Krane, Kenneth. Introductory Nuclear Physics . Wiley, 2008. ISBN: 9788126517855
- Donnelly, Thomas W., Joseph A. Formaggio, Barry R. Holstein, Richard Gerard Milner, and Bernd Surrow. Foundations of Nuclear and Particle Physics . The MIT Press, 2017. ISBN: 9780521765114
- Leo, William R. Techniques for Nuclear and Particle Physics Experiments . Springer, 1994. ISBN: 9783540572800
- Thomson, Mark. Modern Particle Physics . Cambridge University Press, 2013. ISBN: 9781107034266
Prerequisites & course information
Prereq: None. Coreq: 8.321 G (Fall) 3-0-9 units
Sources
- Course catalogue ↗2026–2027
- MIT OpenCourseWare ↗Fall 2020
- MIT OCW syllabus ↗
- Historical MIT OpenCourseWare offering. Named reading entries and schedule topics are automatically extracted from the linked source pages.