At the most fundamental level, all matter is made from twelve types of elementary fermions (quarks and leptons) and all forces are due to the exchange of elementary bosons (photons, W, Z, gluons). The sub-nuclear world can be explained in a remarkably simple way, known as the Standard Model of Particle Physics. This module introduces the most important ideas from this Standard Model. We will also discuss some of the experimental evidence that supports the Standard Model, notably that resulting from the Large Electron Positron (LEP) Collider at CERN. Topics covered will include the classification of particles and the quark model, quark flavours and colours, quantum chromodynamics and gluons, strong and weak decays, conservation rules, parity and change-conjugation, charmonium, electroweak
interactions and the Higgs particle.

By the end of the module the student should be able to:

• Perform calculations using relativistic kinematics to evaluate energies, momenta and masses in particle interactions; perform calculations involving the mean lifetime of unstable particles;
• perform calculations using the cross-sections of particle interactions; understand and use the standard terminology and nomenclature of particle physics; explain how the strength and range of a force are related to the properties on the intermediate force-carrying boson;
• describe the quark model of mesons and baryons;
• explain the flavour and colour quantum numbers of quarks and discuss the evidence for their existence;
• compare the properties of photons and gluons and the theories of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and quantum electrodynamics (QED);
• describe and recognise the characteristic properties of and differences between strong, weak and electromagnetic interactions and decays;
• state and apply conservation rules for particle interactions ;
• discuss the ideas of parity and charge-conjugation in particle physics;
• describe the physics of flavour-changing particle interactions and the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa quark-mixing matrix;
• discuss the physics of the charmonium and Upsilon systems, including the idea of Zweig-suppressed decays;
• describe the physics of electroweak interactions, the properties of W, Z and Higgs bosons and the results from the experiments at the Large Electron-Positron (LEP) Collider.