PH540 Elementary Particle Physics (Spring 2017-18)

PH 540 - Elementary Particle Physics

Review 1

Instructor Name: Urjit Yajnik

Course Type: Honours / Elective

Pre-requisites: QM III

Course Content: Spontaneous Symmetry breaking, Higgs mechanism, goldstone bosons, Gauge Invariance (Abelian and Non-abelian), Glashow-Weinberg-Salam weak force [SU(2)XU(1)], Dirac formalism, scalar and vector fields, gauge bosons, Hadronic decays, quark model, meson and hadron tables, strangeness

Other Topics Covered: Passing mention of QCD Lagrangian, renormalization

Books: Ryder Quantum Field Theory, Halzen and Martin, Quarks, Leptons and Gauge Fields by Huang

Lectures: Lectures were blackboard with no attendance policy. Only once or twice, slides were used. Lectures were sometimes really good, but sometimes too dense and unclear. He didn't come with much preparation, and thus the course content is not well organized. A lot of jargon is there which is sometimes too difficult to understand. QM III is absolutely essential, otherwise, this course is impossible to be understood.

Assignments: 4 assignments combined for a 20% weightage, 30 % Midsem and 50% endsem. Grading was fairly lenient and the difficulty level was moderate.

Exams and Grading: No quizzes

Online Resources: He himself posted a lot of supplementary material on Moodle (he is quite regular on Moodle)

Pro-Tips: Take QM III and be comfortable with all the Dirac formalism and basic Quantum Field theory premise. In addition, a course on Introduction of Nuclear and Particle Physics would be handy since a lot of times, jargon on hadrons, leptons, strangeness etc is thrown around which would be manageable if this course is already taken. 

Personal Comments: This course is great to learn a lot of terms in particle physics and to get familiar with a lot of ideas. The learning, in that case, is immense, but on the other hand, it is not well structured, and thus the mathematical prerequisites, for instance, are the student's responsibility.  For MSc students, best to take in 4th sem after taking QM III as an elective in third. 
Respondent: Vaibhav Sharma

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Review 2

Instructor Name: Prof. Urijit Yajnik

Course Type: Honours / Elective

Pre-requisites: Quantum Mechanics 3

Course Contents: Standard Model Dictionary, Gauge Theories, Feynman Diagrams

Other Topics: Non Abelian Gauge Theories,Chiral Lagrangian theory, Standard Model Lagrangian,
Diagrams of scattering processes - Penguin diagrams, etc

Books: Halzen and Martin; Huang; Griffiths

Lectures: No attendance restrictions, blackboard talks, haphazard but good

Assignments: Tutorial submissions as assignments. Difficulty level = Moderate to High

Exams and Grading: No quiz, Midesm(30%), Endsem(50%), 4 Assignments (20%)

Online Material: Arbitrary google search - a lot required. No specific sites as such.

Follow up Courses: None that run in the department. For self-study, maybe Advanced QFT or QCD.

Pro-Tips: Lot of self-study required. Course structure was haphazard and to string the elements
together, work is needed - not necessarily regular.

Personall Comments: Difficult but enjoyable course.

Respondent: Amey Gaikwad

Note: This is a review to help you make a more informed choice about how to study for this course and/or choosing this course. While we've tried to keep it objective and complete, one must keep in mind that students have varying interests, methods of study, and the course itself changes from year to year.