The General Picture. Isotopic Spin and Strangeness. Yang Mills Theory. Electroweak Unification I. Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking. Electroweak Unification II. Determination of the Neutral Lepton Current. Quarks in Three Colors. Theory of Quark Mixing. Electroweak Interactions of Quarks. Digression: Violation of Isotopic Spin. Mixing and CP Violation in Neutral K, B, and D Mesons. Flavor-Changing Neutral Currents. The Search for the Higgs Boson. Appendices.
Luciano Maiani is Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Rome, La Sapienza. He is a member of the Italian Lincean Academy, a fellow of the American Physical Society, and author of more than 200 scientific publications on the theoretical physics of elementary particles. He has been president of the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), president of the Italian National Council for Research (CNR), and director-general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), where he directed the crucial phases of the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Together with S. Glashow and J. Iliopoulos, he predicted the charm quark, which forms an essential part of the unified theory of the weak and electromagnetic forces.
Written by an award-winning former director-general of CERN and one of the world's leading experts on particle physics, Electroweak Interactions explores the concepts that led to unification of the weak and electromagnetic interactions. It provides the fundamental elements of the theory of compact Lie groups and their representations, enabling a basic understanding of the role of flavor symmetry in particle physics. The author connects important theoretical ideas to key experimental results and provides fully worked out applications to topical electrodynamic and weak interaction processes.