The Best New Particle Physics eBooks To Read In 2025

The fifth edition of this well-established, highly regarded two-volume set continues to provide a fundamental introduction to advanced particle physics while incorporating substantial new experimental results, especially in the areas of Higgs and top sector physics, as well as CP violation and neutrino oscillations. It offers an accessible and practical introduction to the three gauge theories comprising the Standard Model of particle physics: quantum electrodynamics (QED), quantum chromodynamics (QCD), and the Glashow-Salam-Weinberg (GSW) electroweak theory.

Volume 2 of this updated edition covers the two non-Abelian gauge theories of QCD and the GSW theory. A distinctive feature is the extended treatment of two crucial theoretical tools: spontaneous symmetry breaking and the renormalization group. The underlying physics of these is elucidated by parallel discussions of examples from condensed matter systems: superfluidity and superconductivity, and critical phenomena. This new edition includes updates to jet algorithms, lattice field theory, CP violation and the CKM matrix, and neutrino physics. New to the fifth edition:. Tests of the Standard Model in the Higgs and top quark sectorsThe naturalness problem and responses to it going beyond the Standard ModelThe Standard Model as an effective field theoryEach volume should serve as a valuable handbook for students and researchers in advanced particle physics looking for an accessible introduction to the Standard Model of particle physics.

This book introduces readers to the fascinating world of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and quarks and gluons, the elementary constituents of protons, neutrons, and all hadrons. Specifically, it focuses on the color of quarks and gluons, responsible for their mutual interactions via the strong force. The book provides an elementary introduction to the birdtrack technique, which is a powerful tool for addressing the color structure of QCD in a pictorial way. The technique shows how quark and gluon colors are combined and mixed in QCD.

The author discusses color conservation, shows how to project on color states of systems of quarks, antiquarks, and gluons, how to derive their color charges. The book is enriched with many exercises integrated in the text to learn by doing. This book is primarily intended for particle physics students, graduates, and researchers working in the field of QCD. However, it requires no specific prerequisites in QCD, so it may also be of interest to students of mathematics, as an illustration of the use of the birdtrack pictorial technique in representation theory.

The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, the culmination of a decades-long search, is one of the singular triumphs of particle physics. Advanced experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) near Geneva detected the long-hypothesized particle, resulting in the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics. Drawing on two and a half years of in-depth fieldwork spent among CERN’s research community during this critical period, Arpita Roy offers a rich analysis of science in the making. To what extent are scientific discoveries a matter of empirical findings?

How do scientists at the farthest reach of abstraction understand their work? Unfinished Nature delves deep into this particle physics laboratory to distinguish the modes of reasoning that animate scientific discoveries and innovations. Demonstrating a deep knowledge of both contemporary physics and the methods of qualitative social science, Roy considers what scientists have to say about their commitments and concerns, the sources and vision guiding their experiments, and the questions they ask of themselves and others. In so doing, she argues that finding new facts in experimental physics turns on conceptual leaps, not necessarily empirical results. A sophisticated interdisciplinary ethnography of a scientific community, Unfinished Nature offers provocative insights into the nature and production of scientific knowledge.