Lecture Questions

1. Why do we need the Standard Model?
2. What discoveries, in general, led to the development of the Standard Model?
3. What are the three types of elementary particles? (i.e. quarks, leptons, and force mediators)
4. What is an antiparticle?
5. When did we get the first experimental evidence of quarks and when did we discover the last (top) quark?
6. Why do you never find isolated quarks?
7. How and why do the quarks combine to form mesons and baryons?
8. What are the four fundamental forces and what are their relative strengths?
9. What is meant by force unification?
10. How well, in general, has the Standard Model held up to experimental testing?
11. What are the weaknesses of the Standard Model?
12. What models exist beyond the Standard Model? (supersymmetry, etc.)

Tuesday, 13 August 2002:   Accelerators (Mandelkern)

1. How do you produce elementary particles, or where are they found?
2. Why are high acceleration energies important or what do you gain by increasing the energy?
3. What are the benefits of colliders vs. fixed target experiments?
4. How do you accelerate charged particles?
5. How do you steer and focus charged particles?
6. What are the main types of particle accelerators?
7. What are the advantages/disadvantages of linear vs. circular accelerators?
8. What were the first particle accelerators like?
9. What are the major particle accelerators in operation today?
10. What major accelerators are planned for the future?
11. What are the medical applications of accelerators?

Wednesday, 14 August 2002:   Detectors (Stoker)

1. What types of particles emerge from high-energy collisions?
2. What kinds of information about these particles do we need to measure?
3. Why do we want to measure these quantities? (conservation laws)
4. What happens when a charged particle travels through matter?
5. What are the different types of charged particle detectors?
6. How do you use a detector to determine the momentum, charge and energy of a charged particle?
7. How do you detect neutral particles such as photons or neutrons?
8. How do you "detect" a "non-interacting" particle such as a neutrino?
9. What does a typical large collider detector (DZero?) look like?
10. What is (and why) do you need a trigger system in a detector?
11. What are the detection technologies of the future?

Thursday & Friday, 15-16 August 2002:   Cosmic Rays (Shoup)

1. What are the sources of cosmic rays?
2. What types of particles are cosmic rays?
3. What happens when a cosmic ray hits the Earth's atmosphere?
4. At what rate do cosmic rays hit the Earth and how does this rate vary with altitude etc.?
5. What can we learn about the universe from studying cosmic rays?
6. What important discoveries have been made by studying cosmic rays?
7. What are atmospheric and solar neutrinos?
8. How do neutrinos oscillate?
9. What do we now know about neutrino oscillations?
10. How does one detect a cosmic ray?
11. How do you construct a cosmic ray detector?
12. How do you measure the lifetime of a cosmic ray muon? (And how does relativistic time dilation enter?)
13. What are the highest energy cosmic rays observed?

Monday, 19 August 2002:   Conservation Laws (Molzon)

1. What do we already know about the kinematic conservation laws? (i.e. energy and momentum)
2. What are the dynamical conservation laws? (i.e. charge, color, baryon number etc.)
3. How do these conservation laws get expressed in particle decays?
4. Which particles are stable and why?
5. How is a particle's lifetime related to the available decay modes?
6. What quantities are not conserved in all interactions?
7. What violations of the conservation laws have been observed?
8. What do violations of conservation laws tell us about the world/our models?

Tuesday, 20 August 2002:   CP Violation and B Physics (Kirkby)

1. What exactly is meant by parity?
2. How is parity conservation violated in weak decays?
3. What is charge conjugation?
4. How does CP invariance help justify parity nonconservation?
5. What are the implications of CP invariance for the neutral K mesons?
6. How do neutral kaons "mix"?
7. How was CP invariance tested using neutral kaons and what were the results?
8. How is CP violation expected to affect the neutral B mesons?
9. What are the current results of B meson CP violation experiments such as Babar?

Wednesday, 21 August 2002:   Trip to SLAC

Thursday, 22 August 2002:   Higgs Boson (Johnson)

1. What distinguishes an electron from a muon?
2. What are typically masses of elementary particles?
3. How do we explain mass in the standard model?
4. Why do we need to "explain" mass anyway -- isn't it just an elementary property of particles? (We don't worry about "explaining" charge, do we?)
5. What is the Higgs particle?
6. What do we know about its properties (charge, mass, etc.) on theoretical grounds?
7. How can we look for it?
8. What are the results of searches?
9. What are the prospects for future searches?
10. What will we learn when we find it (or don't find it)?

Friday, 23 August 2002:   Extra Dimensions (Feng)

1. What do we mean by the unification of forces?
2. Why do particle physicists consider gravity to be weak?
3. What impact would extra dimensions have on Newton's Law?
4. How well has Newton's Law been verified?
5. What are other implications for particle physics?
6. What are the implications for cosmic rays?
7. What are the implications for black holes?

1. Why were neutrinos postulated, and when were they found?
2. Why are neutrinos hard to detect?
3. What are atmospheric neutrinos?
4. What experimental techniques are required study atmospheric neutrinos?
5. What are "neutrino oscillations"?
6. What are the recent results on atmospheric neutrinos, and why is this important?
7. Why search for proton decay?
8. How do you look for proton decay?
9. What are the recent proton decay results?
10. What are the prospects for future searches?

1. How does the sun shine?
2. What are solar neutrinos?
3. How do they differ from atmospheric neutrinos?
4. What experimental techniques are required study solar neutrinos?
5. Review: What are "neutrino oscillations"?
6. What are the recent results on solar neutrinos?
7. What is a supernova?
8. What are the prospects for supernova observations?

1. How many types of quarks are there?
2. How do quarks make up protons and neutrons?
3. What were the first indications that protons are not elementary?
4. What were the key experiment results leading to the quark model?
5. How do quarks "explain" hadrons and mesons?
6. If free quarks have not been discovered, how do we know they exist?
7. What is color?
8. How many colors are there? How do we know?
9. What are the masses of quarks?
10. How precisely has the quark model been tested? Could there be quarks we haven't discovered?

1. What are the basic features of the universe now (isotropy, homogeneity, etc.)?
2. What is the Big Bang? What evidence is there for it?
3. What is the current standard model of cosmology?
4. What is the cosmic microwave background?
5. Why is the CMB in the news a lot these days?
6. What is dark energy? What is the cosmological constant?
7. Why is dark energy in the news a lot these days?
8. What is dark matter?
9. What do we know about dark matter?
10. What are the exciting prospects for cosmology?

1. What length scales are described by the standard model of particle physics? What are the traditional experimental tools of particle physics?
2. What length scales are described by the standard model of cosmology? What are the traditional tools of cosmology?
3. What are three fundamental questions cosmology poses to particle physics?
4. What are some tools the cosmos provides for answering these questions?
5. What particles were discovered in cosmic rays?
6. What are the uses of cosmic rays now and in the future?
7. What is the evidence for dark matter?
8. Can dark matter be made up entirely of known particles? Why not?
9. What is dark energy?
10. What are some of the puzzles associated with dark energy?

1. What is the historical background behind the development of quantum field theory?
2. What are two reasons we need fields to describe particle physics?
3. What is the Lagrangian formulation of classical mechanics?
4. What are the Euler-Langrage equations?
5. What is classical field theory?
6. What happens when classical fields are quantized?
7. How are interactions included in quantum field theory?
8. What is gauge symmetry?
9. How does gauge invariance explain the existence of charged and neutral particles?
10. What is U(1)? SU(2)? SU(3)? What interactions do these gauge groups describe?