From Quarks And Gluons To Quantum Gravity

In August/September 2002, a group of 78 physicists from 50 laboratories in 17 countries met in Erice, Italy, to participate in the 40th Course of the International School of Subnuclear Physics. The purpose of the School was to focus attention on the theoretical and phenomenological developments in gauge theories, as well as in all the other sectors of subnuclear physics. Experimental highights from the most relevant sources of new data were presented and discussed, including the latest news on theoretical developments in quantizing the gravitational forces.This volume constitutes the proceedings of the School. It is dedicated to the memory of Victor Frederick Weisskopf, a founder ? together with John Stewart Bell, Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett and Isidor Isaac Rabi ? of the ?Ettore Majorana? Centre for Scientific Culture, this School being the first of its 114 Schools now in existence.

From August 29 to September 7, 2006, a large group of distinguished lecturers and young physicists coming from various countries around the world met in Erice, Italy, at the Ettore Majorana Foundation and Centre for Scientific Culture (EMFCSC) for the 44th course of the International School of Subnuclear Physics: OC The Logic of Nature, Complexity and New Physics: From Quark-Gluon Plasma to Superstrings, Quantum Gravity and BeyondOCO.This book is a collection of lectures given during the course, covering the most recent advances in theoretical physics and the latest results from current experimental facilities. Following one of the aims of the School, which is to encourage and promote young physicists to achieve recognition at an international level, the students who have distinguished themselves for their excellence in research have been given the opportunity to publish their presentations in this volume.

"In his new book, the author introduces us to the world of particles He traces the century of progress in our search for the basic units of matter as well as those of the forces that act on it, starting from the electron and photon, the first entry in the list of elementary quantum particles, and ending up with the quarks and gluons discovered in the last decades of this century. He gives the curious layman a clear understanding of the forefront of our knowledge about the structure of matter at its deepest level".Y NambuUniversity of Chicago"This is a readable little book on particle physics and is aimed at those with no previous exposure to the subject Nevertheless, as one would expect from a leading contributor to the field, Han takes care to get things right even when using simple language, as for example in his discussion of spin".CERN Courier

In August/September 2002, a group of 78 physicists from 50 laboratories in 17 countries met in Erice, Italy, to participate in the 40th Course of the International School of Subnuclear Physics. The purpose of the School was to focus attention on the theoretical and phenomenological developments in gauge theories, as well as in all the other sectors of subnuclear physics. Experimental highights from the most relevant sources of new data were presented and discussed, including the latest news on theoretical developments in quantizing the gravitational forces. This volume constitutes the proceedings of the School. It is dedicated to the memory of Victor Frederick Weisskopf, a founder OCo together with John Stewart Bell, Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett and Isidor Isaac Rabi OCo of the OC Ettore MajoranaOCO Centre for Scientific Culture, this School being the first of its 114 Schools now in existence. Contents: Mini-Courses on Basics: Physics of QCD Instantons (E V Shuryak); Confinement and Duality (M J Strassler); Status of Super String Theory (E Verlinde); Perturbative Quantum Gravity (G ''t Hooft); Experimental Highlights: Highlights from Gran Sasso Laboratory (A Bettini); Experimental Highlights from Super-Kamiokande (Y Totsuka); The Fermilab Experimental Physics Program (R Tschirhardt); Special Sessions for New Talents: Application of the Large- N c Limit to a Chiral Lagrangian with Resonances (O Cata); Towards the Finite Temperature Gluon Propagator in Landau Gauge YangOCoMills Theory (A Maas); Hermes Measurements of the Nucleon Spin Structure (J Wendland); and other papers. Readership: High energy, experimental and theoretical physicists."

Today we are blessed with two extraordinarily successful theories of physics. The first is Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which describes the large-scale behaviour of matter in a curved spacetime. This theory is the basis for the standard model of big bang cosmology. The discovery of gravitational waves at the LIGO observatory in the US (and then Virgo, in Italy) is only the most recent of this theory's many triumphs. The second is quantum mechanics. This theory describes the properties and behaviour of matter and radiation at their smallest scales. It is the basis for the standard model of particle physics, which builds up all the visible constituents of the universe out of collections of quarks, electrons and force-carrying particles such as photons. The discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN in Geneva is only the most recent of this theory's many triumphs. But, while they are both highly successful, these two structures leave a lot of important questions unanswered. They are also based on two different interpretations of space and time, and are therefore fundamentally incompatible. We have two descriptions but, as far as we know, we've only ever had one universe. What we need is a quantum theory of gravity. Approaches to formulating such a theory have primarily followed two paths. One leads to String Theory, which has for long been fashionable, and about which much has been written. But String Theory has become mired in problems. In this book, Jim Baggott describes "the road less travelled": an approach which takes relativity as its starting point, and leads to a structure called Loop Quantum Gravity. Baggott tells the story through the careers and pioneering work of two of the theory's most prominent contributors, Lee Smolin and Carlo Rovelli. Combining clear discussions of both quantum theory and general relativity, this book offers one of the first efforts to explain the new quantum theory of space and time.

It has been almost thirty years since Yang and Mills (1954) performed their pioneering work on gauge theories, and it is probably safe to say that we have in our hands a good candidate for a theory of the strong interactions, based precisely on a non-Abelian gauge theory. While our understanding of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is still incomplete, there have been sufficient theoretical developments, many of them enjoying a degree of support from experimental evidence, to justify a reasonably systematic treatise on the subject. Of course, no presentation of QCD can claim to be complete, since the theory is still in the process of elaboration. The selection of topics reflects this: I have tried to discuss those parts of the theory that are more likely to endure, and particularly those developments that can, with a minimum of rigor, be derived from "first principles." To be sure, prejudice has also influenced my choice: one necessarily tends to give more attention to subjects with which one is familiar, and to eschew unfamiliar ones. I will not pause here to point out topics which perhaps should have been included* (see, however, Section 46); the list of references should fill in the gaps. "The one I regret most is lattice QCD. At the time I wrote the first draft of this book, lattice QCD had not undergone the spectacular development we have recently witnessed.