Physics PHY498F/1489F, Fall 2011
Introduction to High Energy Physics



Course Home Page: http://www.physics.utoronto.ca/~krieger/phys489.html



[ Instructor | Announcements | Course Progress | Homework | Class Room and Hours ]
[ Text Book | Useful Links | Teaching Assistant / Tutorials | Grading | Course Plan | Tentative Outline ]


Instructor

Peter Krieger

Associate Professor
Department of Physics
60 St. George Street
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario
Canada M5S 1A7

Office: McLennan Laboratory 801 [Office Hours: drop by or make an appointment]
Phone: (416) 978-2950
Fax: (416) 978-8221
www: http://www.physics.utoronto.ca/~krieger/
E-mail: krieger@physics.utoronto.ca N.B. Please put PHY489 in subject line of any course-related emails. I will try to reply as quickly as possible to your emails. However, I cannot promise that I will do so outside of normal working hours (Monday-Friday 9-5 for example). Please also note that I will NOT accept assigments via email.

Announcements (reverse chronological order)

Any announcements made outside of class time will appear here. I will do my best to also post any announcements that are made verbally in class. However, I cannot promise that this will always occur. It is YOUR responsibility to attend class or, if you do not, to ensure that you are aware of what was discussed, including issues not directly related to course material.

30/11/11 The solutions for assignment 3 are now posted below.

30/11/11 The solutions for assignment 2 are now posted below.

30/11/11 As agreed upon in class today, I will accept the final assignment (nominally due Dec. 5) until 5PM Friday Dec. 9. No assignments will be accepted after that. The solutions will be posted shortly thereafter. Please note that, unless you hand your assignment in in class on Monday, you must put your assignment in the drop box. I will be out of town for the rest of the week. I am happy to (try to) answer questions via email, and I will be in my office the day before the exam if there are last-minute questions.

14/11/11 A number of you have asked to have the assignment 3 problems posted as early as possible. They are now linked below. The nominal due date is the last day of lectures, but I may accept them without penalty for a few days after that. However, the final exam is on the 13th of December, so how long I accept late assignments depends on when people want the solutions posted. We can discuss this in class and vote if necessary.

08/11/11 For anyone confused by the comment in the last part of question 2 on the problem set (since I had one question about this today) let me say the following: I don't need an exact answer -- there is a way to do the numerical part of this problem approximately in just a line or two of calculation. You can of course do the more complete calculation, but it is not mandatory. So my comment about not "overcomplicating" things was perhaps somewhat ill-phrased. I should have just said that an approximate result would be fine. But perhaps this clarification comes too late......

26/10/11 The formulae sheets that will be provided with the mid-term test on Monday can be found here . Please let me know if you see anything that you think is either incorrect or unclear.

26/10/11 The problems for your second assignment are now posted below in the homework section.

05/10/11 As reqested in class today, we will have a tutorial (related to the issues covered on the first assignment) in the reserved time slot on Friday. HOWEVER, I have lab interviews up until 12:15, so we will start at 12:20 rather than 12:10. Those of you who arrive at 12:10 might want to start by discussing things with one another.

28/09/11 The problems for your first assignment are now linked below in the homework section.

31/08/11 Please note that course information such as marking schemes and assignment / test dates appearing below are currently still tentative. They will be finalized during the first week of lectures.

As we will discuss in the first lecture, I will post the slides for each lecture below, in the Course Progress section, next to the corresponding date. I will try to do this the day before the lecture so that people who wish to bring a copy to class can do so, but I can't promise to manage this all the time, since I often make changes when looking things over before lectures.

Note that on the deparmental web page for this course it say 24 lectures MWF12. The lectures are on Mondays and Wednesdays. The Friday slot is reserved in case we need to have a makeup lecture at some point. We can also use it for a review session before the mid-term and final exam, if people wish. We can also occasionally schedule a tutorial if people would like that. I am meant to be in the undergraduate lab during that time slot, but I can slip out for that hour if need be. However, for the most part, we will not use the Friday time slot.


PHY 489/1489F Course Progress ( Past Classes , Upcoming Classes )

At any point during the term the following is meant to document the topics that have been covered and indicate the topics that I plan to cover in future classes. In the case of future classes, this list is mean as a guideline only, not as a formal course outline. Things may shift as the term progresses. The term has been shortened by two lectures starting this year. At the moment I've dealt with this (i.e. in the outline below) by shortening a couple of the later lectures, but I will find a better way to handle this.


12/09/11: Introduction to the Standard Model slides
14/09/11: Quark model of Hadrons, Decays slides
19/09/11: Conservation Laws slides
21/09/11: Relativistic Kinematics slides
26/09/11: Relativistic Kinematics cont'd slides
28/09/11: Conservation Laws, Angular Momentum, Addition of Angular Momentum slides
03/10/11: Spin-1/2 systems, Isospin slides
05/10/11: Parity, Charge Conjugation, G-Parity slides
10/10/11: Thanksgiving: no lecture
12/10/11: Quark mixing, CP violation slides
17/10/11: Particle Decays, Lifetimes; Scattering slides
19/10/11: Fermi's Golden Rule; Lorentz-invariant Phase Space, 2-Body decays, 2-body scattering slides
24/10/11: Feynman Rules, Calculation of Matrix Elements slides
26/10/11: The Dirac Equation slides
31/10/11: Class Test
02/11/11: No lecture...we went over the mid-term.
07/11/11: November break: No lecture
09/11/11: More on the Dirac Equation slides
14/11/11: Feynman Rules for QED slides
16/11/11: More QED, Electrodynamics of quarks and hadrons slides
21/11/11: Weak Interactions slides
23/11/11: Neutral Weak Interactions slides
28/11/11: Neutral Weak Interactions cont'd (same slides as last time).
30/11/11: Chiral Fermions slides
05/12/11: Electroweak Unification slides
07/12/11: No class



Homework Assignments

Assignment due dates are given below and noted above in the Course Progress section. Late assignments will be accepted up to a week after the due date, with a penalty of 50%/week (10%/weekday) and a daily deadline of 5PM. Assignments later than one week will not be accepted. You can hand in the assignments at the beginning or end of the lecture period, or use drop box #14 in the Burton Tower stairwell (ask if you don't know where this is). Please do not slide assignments under my office door.

Solutions will be posted on a password protected web page. The username and password will be given out in class, or available via email (after the solutions to the first assignment have been posted).

A note on the problem sets.

I expect that, in the course of doing your assignments, you will discuss them with your classmates at some level. This is fine, and a normal part of the study process. What you most emphatically should NOT do, is copy answers from your classmates (or from anywhere else). It is fine to discuss the problems, but when it comes to actually writing out your solutions you should do this by yourself. To copy answers from someone else is an academic offense. But the more important reason not to do this is that you will not learn the material if you do not do problems yourself. It is quite possible to understand the approach to solving a problem, but still find that when you sit down to actually do it, you somehow can't get it to work out. The only way to really learn the course material is to apply it.

On another note, the problems in Griffiths are for the most part relatively straightforward. Most, but not all, of the assignment problems will come from the text, but I strongly encourage you, as part of your studying, to attempt as many of the problems at the end of each chapter as you have time for, and I am happy to discuss these with you if you find you are having trouble.

Problem Set Problems Due Date Solutions
Problem Set #1 posted Sept. 28 Oct. 12, 2011 posted Oct. 24
Problem Set #2 Posted Oct. 26 Nov. 9, 2011 posted Nov. 30
Problem Set #3 Posted Nov. 14 Dec. 5, 2011 posted Dec. 10

Tests and Exams

The coursework will consist of three problem sets, one test (50 min., in class), and a final exam.

The class test will take place on October 31. More information will be provided closer to the test date.

Information on the final exam will appear later in the term. The date and time will be available from the university exams website .

Class Room and Hours


Text Book

Useful Reference Books


Useful Links


Grading (Tentative)


Course Plan



Tentative Outline

  1. Introduction / Overview

  2. Chapter 3: Relativistic Kinematics

  3. Chapter 4: Symmetries

  4. Chapter 6: The Feynman Calculus

  5. Chapter 7: Quantum Electrodynamics

  6. Chapter 8: Electrodynamics of Quarks and Hadrons (Section 8.1)

  7. Chapter 9: Weak Interactions