Week 1

Here I am again...

In this blog I pretend to write the thing learned through the week and comment different stuff related with physics as well as mathematics.

Particle Physics.

After half an afternoon, I finally got the whole set of vertices of the electroweak theory... It makes me feel such more sure about Yang-Mills theories.

In the last two weeks I have learnt a lot about Yang-Mills, spontaneous symmetry breaking and resonances. A nice reference to review is the book by Chris Quigg, GAUGE THEORIES OF THE STRONG, WEAK AND ELECTROMAGNETIC INTERACTIONS. Despite the step by step procedure is not in the book, it is a quick guide of the subject.

At the SPIRES page, there is a section of videos, in there you can also find a set of lectures on the subject, as well as in the CERN page.

Quantum Mechanics.

At the beginning of the semester my professor said it'd be interested to understand the shape of the line spectrum. As you figure... I ask myself, Why is that important?, Well, as usual he was right.

Fermi's golden rule include a delta distribution of the energy, that means that if the initial and final energies are not exactly the same the transition does not take place. Nonetheless, uncertainty implies there is a gap of energy in which the transitions indeed happens.

One can calculate the width of the shapes, and at the end of the day it is related with the decay width of the transition. (Amazing!)

That's not all... the same procedure can be used to correct the amplitudes of certain process, and the imaginary part is that gives the resonances. So, I learnt a lo about particle physics just by studying quantum mechanics.

For the future.

Now, I'm reviewing some stuff on supersymmetry and renormalization group. If things go well, the final task is to know some about the new methods of renormalization of gravity. Also, a small ``project" on particles is to do the theoretical analysis of electron-positron annihilation at high energies, in order to see the Higgs (if possible).

Oscar.