Physics In D ≥ 4 Tasi 2004

PREFACE

CONTENTS

PHOTOS

I present an overview of the standard model, concentrating on its global continuous symmetries, both exact and approximate. There are four lectures, dedicated to spacetime symmetry, flavor symmetry, custodial symmetry, and scale symmetry. Topics include Weyl, Majorana, and Dirac spinors; massive neutrinos; electroweak symmetry breaking; effective field theory; and the hierarchy problem.

I give an introduction to precision electroweak analysis, beginning with calculation at tree-level which most simply illustrates the procedure. I then work out the formalism for one-loop corrections to the vector boson self energies (oblique corrections). This is a tractable subset of the complete electroweak program. Not only does this exercise provide an analytically accessible demonstration of the theory involved in electroweak precision analyses, it also teaches students a useful technique to analyze a large class of theories beyond the Standard Model.

These lectures introduce some of the basic methods of perturbative QCD and their applications to phenomenology at high energy. Emphasis is given to techniques that are used to study QCD and related field theories to all orders in perturbation theory, with introductions to infrared safety, factorization and evolution in high energy hard scattering.

After a brief motivation of flavor physics, these lectures provide a pedagogical introduction to effective field theory, the effective weak Lagrangian, and the technology of renormalization-group improved perturbation theory. These general methods are then applied in the context of heavy-quarks physics, introducing the concepts of heavy-quark and soft-collinear effective theory.

I discuss, in a semi-pedagogical way, our current understanding of neutrino physics. I present a brief history of how the neutrino came to be “invented” and observed, and discuss the evidence that led to the recent discovery that neutrinos change flavor. I then spend some time presenting mass-induced neutrino flavor change (neutrino oscillation), and how it pieces all the neutrino puzzles except for the LSND anomaly, which is also briefly discussed. I conclude by highlighting the importance of determining the nature of the neutrinos, i.e., are they Dirac or Majorana fermions.

In these lectures I briefly review the Higgs mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking and focus on the most relevant aspects of the phenomenology of the Standard Model and of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model Higgs bosons at both hadron (Tevatron, Large Hadron Collider) and lepton (International Linear Collider) colliders. Some emphasis is put on the perturbative calculation of both Higgs boson branching ratios and production cross section, including the most important radiative corrections.

A brief overview of experimental hadron collider physics for theoretical physics students, illustrated with recent results from the DØ and CDF experiments at the Tevatron.

These lectures are meant to provide an introductory presentation on the basic knowledge and techniques for collider physics. Special efforts have been made for those theorists who need to know some experimental issues in collider environments, and for those experimenters who would like to know more about theoretical considerations in searching for new signals at colliders.

We provide a brief description of the material covered during the lectures on dynamical electroweak symmetry breaking and a guide to further reading.

These TASI 2004 lecture notes provide a pedagogical introduction to Little Higgs models. The “Simplest Little Higgs” is used wherever explicit examples are given. Precision electroweak constraints and collider phenomenology as well as T-parity are briefly discussed.

These lectures give an introduction to the problem of finding a realistic and natural extension of the standard model based on spontaneously broken supersymmetry. Topics discussed at some length include the effective field theory paradigm, coupling constants as superfield spurions, gauge mediated supersymmetry breaking, and anomaly mediated supersymmetry breaking, including an extensive introduction to supergravity relevant for phenomenology.

Introductory lectures on Extra Dimensions delivered at TASI 2004.

The phenomenology of large, warped, and universal extra dimensions are reviewed. Characteristic signals are emphasized over an extensive survey. This is the writeup of lectures given at the Theoretical Advanced Study Institute in 2004.

This is a pedagogical introduction into the possible uses and effects of extra dimensions in electroweak (TeV scale) physics, and in particular to models of electroweak symmetry breaking via boundary conditions (“higgsless models”). It is self contained: all the aspects of extra dimensional and electroweak physics used here are reviewed, before we apply these concepts to higgsless models. In the first lecture gauge theories in an extra dimension and on an interval are discussed. In the second lecture we describe the basic structure of higgsless models, while in the third lecture we discuss fermions in extra dimensions and the inclusion of fermions into higgsless models. The final lecture is devoted to the issue of electroweak precision observables in theories beyond the standard model and its applications to extra dimensional theories and in particular the higgsless models.

Selected topics in Astroparticle Physics including the CMB, dark matter, BBN, and the variations of fundamental couplings are discussed.

Student Seminars

KT-FEST

Student Participants

Lecturers, Directors, and Local Organizing Committee