Fundamentals of Particle Interactions

📋 Course Outline

1. Flavour symmetry revisited
2. Quantum Chromodynamics local gauge principle
3. Colour confinement and asymptotic freedom
4. QCD in electron positron annihilation
5. Hadron hadron collisions and colour factors
6. Weak interaction charged current and V minus A
7. Chiral structure and W boson propagator
8. Lepton universality and neutrino scattering
9. Neutrino oscillations and mass eigenstates
10. Ionisation energy loss and minimum ionising particles
11. Electromagnetic showers and critical energy
12. Electromagnetic calorimeters and shower containment

📖 1. Flavour symmetry revisited

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Flavour symmetry : Flavour symmetry is an approximate invariance that treats different quark flavours as interchangeable in the strong-interaction description.
• Isospin SU(2) : Isospin SU(2) is the flavour symmetry subgroup that groups up and down quarks into a doublet with nearly equal strong interactions.
• SU(3) flavour symmetry : SU(3) flavour symmetry is the larger flavour symmetry that organizes the light quarks into multiplets and relates their strong-interaction properties.
• Flavour multiplets : Flavour multiplets are sets of hadron states grouped together because flavour symmetry predicts relations among their quantum numbers and wavefunctions.

📝 Essential Points