Part III Particle Physics
Major Option
Michaelmas 2025
Lecture Slides / Handouts
Slides: as lectured rather than printed. Online-only, with appendices. Updated with corrections where stated in the list below.
Slides: as printed at the start of term, not as lectured. Never corrected!.
Supplements to Lecture Slides / Handouts
Non-examinable Appendices (online-only not printed).
Non-examinable propagator supplement to handout 3.
Hand sketched notes
on
SU(2) vs SU(3) comparison, and general SU(3) multiplets. See also the Particle Data Group's professional printed summary of SU(n) multiplet properties.
Examples sheet 2025
Extra Part III Project on Electron Charge mis-ID
The bullet points of section 2 of
this technical document
may give an idea of what a student would do.
Clarifications and Corrections to printed version of the 2025 handout:
- Slide 11: Third bullet point (containing third run of dots) should end "so mass" (not energy) "is GeV/c^2". [Fixed online.]
- Slide 16: This slide shoud say "more detail will be provieded later" not "more detail will be provided earlier". [Fixed online.]
- Slide 41: On the third last line of the printed version of this slide the expression for E2(p1) lacks either a square root sign on the RHS or a square on the LHS. [Fixed online.]
- Slide 92: The third 4x4 capital-sigma matrices in the top half of the slide is labelled Simga x instead of Sigma z. Fixed online.
- Slide 132: On this slide the third-last bullet point has always meant to be read or taken within the context of the E-much-bigger-than-m limit stated above the fourth-last bullet point .... but the punctuation as printed maybe did not make this clear. So this year (2025) I have updated the electronic version of the handout to restate E-much-bigger-than-m in this third-last bullet point.
- Slide 169: I have decided to delete from the online version the middle two bullet points that were in the printed version. They were not wrong -- I just don't think they add much and they distract from the main message of the slide. So this is not a correction but a simplification.
- Slide 177: the second diagram that was on the printed version of this slide should not have been there. I have deleted it in the online version. (It showed the COM frame. We only want the lab-frame diagram showing on this slide!).
- Slide 178: the printed version of this slide has three bullet points under "Properties of Bjorken y". In the online version I have deleted the middle bullet point (that used to defined y in terms of cos theta*) as I think we don't need it elsewhere, and also it was only true in a not very well explained limit.
- Slide 179: The printed slide was not *wrong*, but the explanations at the bottom were not particlarly clear. For the online version I have tried to re-word and simplify the last 40% of this slide.
- Slide 211: Removed the word "four" from the last bullet point, since there are infnitely many matrices in U(1). And changed "4 independent matrices" to "4 independent d.o.f. in these matrices" above it.
Demonstrating/Supervision arrangements for 2025:
Supervision instructions here.
Ephemera
- Twistor Theory crib sheet
- Link to the Particle Data Group's review of CPT Invariance Tests in Neutral Kaon Decay.
- GROSSER PREIS VON DEUTSCHLAND Trabrennen Hamburg
- Anglepoise chairs in USA15, LHC Point 1, CERN
- Full 2022 handout, but with 2022 bugs and features, can be found on the 2022 course webpage.
- Cernettes performing "Collider", and the first ever photo on the web.
- New (2021) Yukawa Higgs Mechanism Simulator.
- Old (2015) WavesOnStringsLagrangian relating to this Higgs mechanism simulator which is launchable here.
- Search for Non-Standard Sources of Parity Violation in Jets at s√=8 TeV with CMS Open Data.
- Second most important result ever to come out of CERN.
- My LHCb 2015+2019 pentaquarks summary.
- LHCb 2019 pentaquarks paper.
- LHCb 2015 pentaquarks paper.
- 2016 PDG entry for Top Quark mass. (Or browse via: PDG, particle listigs, quarks, quarks , t quark)
- Christchurch Earthquake, 2016, New Zealand, as seen by the LHC.
- Gauge transformation on a railway line.
- Never Lubricate the Davy.
- Prof Dirac's gown.
- BS - BSbar mixing.
- Revision notes on multiplets from a past student of the course (Zain_Ibrahim_Siddiqi, zis24) uploaded with permission.
- ATLAS Higgs Discovery paper:
- Constraints on Heffalon production at the LHC.
- Heffalon resources elsewhere on the web.
- Dirac discovers another attractive force.
- The moodle link for the course is here but it is not currently used for anything.
-
2022 version of course.
- A failed attempt to win Oriel College's "Eugene Lee-Hamilton Prize". The Provost and Fellows of Oriel College offer a prize of £60 for the best Petrarchan Sonnet in English submitted by an undergraduate of Oxford or Cambridge, on a subject to be chosen by the candidate. Enjambment between the eighth and ninth lines will be permitted. Some past entries from students on this course:
