Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Peskin, Michael E.
In this lecture, I review some of the perspectives on the Higgs boson discussed at the Higgs Hunting 2012 Worshop and discuss the short- and long-term aspects of Higgs physics.
I estimate the accuracies on Higgs boson coupling constants that experiments at the Large Hadron Collider and the International Linear Collider are capable of reaching over the long term.
In this lecture, I summarize developments presented at the Lepton Photon 2011 conference and give my perspective on the current situation in high-energy physics. I am grateful to the organizers of Lepton Photon 2011 for providing us a very pleasant and simulating week in Mumbai. This year's Lepton Photon conference has covered the full range of subjects that fall within the scope of high-energy physics, including connections to cosmology, nuclear physics, and atomic physics. The experiments that were discussed detect particles ranging in energy from radio frequencies to EeV.
New arguments based on astrophysical phenomena constrain the possibility that dangerous black holes will be produced at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. On 8 August, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN injected its first beams, beginning an experimental program that will produce proton-proton collisions at an energy of 14 TeV. Particle physicists are waiting expectantly. The reason is that the Standard Model of strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions, despite its many successes, is clearly incomplete. Theory says that the holes in the model should be filled by new physics in the energy region that will be studied by the LHC. Some candidate theories are simple quick fixes, but the most interesting ones involve new concepts of spacetime waiting to be discovered. Look up the LHC on Wikipedia, however, and you will find considerable space devoted to safety concerns. At the LHC, we will probe energies beyond those explored at any previous accelerator, and we hope to create particles that have never been observed. Couldn't we, then, create particles that would actually be dangerous, for example, ones that would eat normal matter and eventually turn the earth into a blob of unpleasantness? It is morbid fun to speculate about such things, and candidates for such dangerous particles have been suggested. These suggestions have been analyzed in an article in Reviews of Modern Physics by Jaffe, Busza, Wilczek, and Sandweiss and excluded on the basis of constraints from observation and from the known laws of physics. These conclusions have been upheld by subsequent studies conducted at CERN.
These lectures give a pedagogical discussion of the computation of QCD tree amplitudes for collider physics. The tools reviewed are spinor products, color ordering, MHV amplitudes, and the Britto-Cachazo-Feng-Witten recursion formula.