Experimental Foundations of Elementary Particle Physics

General Information

This course is intended to introduce the participants to the experimental aspects of elementary particle physics. The aim is to provide you with the background needed to participate actively in research. The course material will be covered in a mixture of methods ("traditional" lectures, exercises, computer simulations, paper presentations, the possibility to participate in lab work or detector construction).

• Instructor: Adriaan C. König (2007); Frank Filthaut (2002-2006)
• Weight: 9 EC
• Lectures: Fall semester 2007
• Prerequisites: Quantum Mechanics 2 and Introduction to Subatomic Physics or equivalent
• Course information as found in the Prospectus

Contents

The course material is web-based (click on the hyperlinks for the individual chapters). This is done by converting Latex source files, and problems with fonts may occur. If this is the case, please let me know. There are known deficiencies of the conversion, in that e.g. the symbol for Planck's constant is unknown to most fonts. In case of problems please refer to the corresponding PostScript files, links to which are provided off the individual chapters' web pages.

1. Introduction
• General
• Fragmentation
• Parton densities
• Quantities of interest
• Relativistic kinematics
2. Accelerators
   • History of particle accelerators
   • Betatron motion
   • Acceleration
   • Beam cooling
   • Resonances and tune shifts
3. Interactions of charged particles with matter
   • Energy loss
   • Energy loss fluctuations and the Landau distribution
   • Multiple Coulomb scattering
   • Concluding remarks
4. Charged particle tracking
   • Gaseous detectors
     • Basic operation of the proportional counter
     • Primary ionization
     • Drift in gases
     • Avalanche formation
     • Choice of drift gas
     • Track reconstruction using proportional counters
     • Multi-wire proportional chambers
     • Drift chambers
     • New developments
   • Solid-state detectors
     • Properties of crystalline silicon
     • The p-n junction
     • Silicon strip detectors
     • Radiation issues
     • Pixel detectors
     • Some detector systems
5. Scintillation
   • Physical Principle
   • Organic Scintillators
   • Photodetection
   • Applications
6. Cherenkov radiation
   • Physical Principle
   • Cherenkov counters
     • Threshold Cherenkov counters
     • Ring Imaging Cherenkov detectors
7. Calorimetry
   • Electromagnetic calorimetry
     • Interactions of electrons and photons
     • Shower development
     • Detection
   • Hadronic calorimetry
     • Hadronic interactions
     • Response
8. Data handling
   • Digitization
   • Data acquisition and triggering
   • Data reconstruction
9. Weak Interactions
• Discovery of the muon
• The neutrino hypothesis
• The Fermi theory, and parity violation
• Anti-neutrinos and neutrino flavours
• Neutrino scattering experiments
• Discovery of the W and Z bosons
• Electroweak interactions at e⁺e^- experiments
10. The Strong Interaction
• Hadrons
• Deep-inelastic scattering
• Quantum ChromoDynamics
11. Mixing and CP Violation
• The neutral kaon system
• The CKM matrix
• The neutral B meson system
• Neutrino oscillations

Time table

The tentative time table for the above can be found here.

General Literature

Books

Unfortunately, there is not a single textbook that covers all material in the depth that is aimed for in this course. However, there are three books that together cover a fair part of the course. A number of copies of these have been requested for the library:

1. M. Conte and W. MacKay, An Introduction to the Physics of Particle Accelerators,
   World Scientific Publishing Co., ISBN 981-02-0813-8
2. R. Fernow, Introduction to experimental particle physics,
   Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-37940-7
3. D. Griffiths, Introduction to Elementary Particles,
   J. Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0-471-60386-4

• K. Kleinknecht, Detectors for particle radition,
  Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-64854-8

Web Resources

1. A compilation of the experimental data on the properties of particles is made on a yearly basis by the Particle Data Group. Also many (fairly brief) reviews on specific topics can be found here.
2. The most widely used preprint database in High Energy Physics is SPIRES. Typically, most articles published starting from 1994 (and many older ones) can be found here.
3. For the part on detection techniques, a good (but focused on application and not very in-depth on the basic physics) source is the CERN Academic Training course given by C. Joram (parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
4. A good overview of data acquisition issues (and one also giving a good impression of the differences between lepton and hadron colliders) is the CERN Academic Training course given by C. Gaspar (pdf).
5. Very brief descriptions of various phenomena, detection techniques, and various detectors are given in the Particle Detector BriefBook by R.K.Bock and A. Vasilescu
6. In general, many topics are discussed more in-depth in the CERN Academic Training series

Other literature (including web resources) relevant to specific topics will be indicated in the corresponding chapters.