Particle Physics: A Very Short Introduction
Frank Close
Language: English
Pages: 160
ISBN: 0192804340
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In Particle Physics: A Very Short Introduction, best-selling author Frank Close provides a compelling and lively introduction to the fundamental particles that make up the universe. The book begins with a guide to what matter is made up of and how it evolved, and goes on to describe the fascinating and cutting-edge techniques used to study it. The author discusses particles such as quarks, electrons, and the neutrino, and exotic matter and antimatter. He also investigates the forces of nature, accelerators and detectors, and the intriguing future of particle physics. This book is essential reading for general readers interested in popular science, students of physics, and scientists at all levels.
About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.
Fundamental of Photonics (2nd Edition)
Radioactivity: A Very Short Introduction
Cosmology: The Origin and Evolution of Cosmic Structure (2nd Edition)
The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist
Optimal Control with Aerospace Applications (Space Technology Library, Volume 32)
recognized as that element. Nearly all of these elements, such as the oxygen that you breathe and the carbon in your skin, were made in stars about 5 billion years ago, at around the time that the Earth was first forming. Hydrogen and helium are even older, most hydrogen having been made soon after the Big Bang, later to provide the fuel of the stars within which the other elements would be created. Think again of that breath of oxygen and its million billion billion atoms within your lungs.
capable of producing strange particles, such as K-mesons, otic matt in abundance. Thus it was that in 1964 a team of physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York discovered er (an that about one in a million times, the matter and antimatter accounts in the K-meson decays failed to d antimatt balance. er) The nature of this asymmetry is so subtle that investigating it has been one of the most demanding and delicate measurements in modern physics. The breakthrough came
their energy spectrum, we can begin to get a quantitative look inside our nearest star. Wh Five billion years hence these will be the primary processes, along ere ha with the fusion to build up yet heavier elements. In some stars (but not our Sun) this process continues, building up the nuclei of s matt elements up to iron, which is the most stable of all (there are even er c elements beyond iron that are built but they tend to be rarer). om Eventually such a star is unable to
diameter of the Sun. So this places the human measuring scale roughly in the middle between those of the Sun and an atom. The particles that make up atoms – the electrons that form the outer regions, and the quarks, which are the ultimate seeds of the central nucleus – are themselves a further factor of about a billion smaller than the atomic whole. A fully grown human is a bit less than two metres tall. For much of what we will meet in this book, orders of magnitude are more important than
scientific apparatus) and so atoms are the norm here. However, in the centre of the Sun, the temperature is some 107 K, or in energy terms 1 keV; atoms cannot survive such conditions. At temperatures above 1010 K there is enough energy available that it can be converted into particles, such as electrons. An individual electron has a mass of 0.5 MeV/ c 2, and so it requires 0.5 MeV of energy to ‘congeal’ into an electron. As we shall see later, this cannot happen spontaneously; an electron and
