Quarks and Leptons: An Introductory Course in Modern Particle Physics

by Francis Halzen, Alan D. Martin

This self-contained text describes breakthroughs in our understanding of the structure and interactions of elementary particles. It provides students of theoretical or experimental physics with the background material to grasp the significance of these developments.

Genres: Physics, Science, Nonfiction, Technical, Textbooks, Academic

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 20, 1984

Reviews

[Bojan Tunguz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Particle Physics is one of those branches of Physics that can be taught either at a very pedestrian, "stamp-collecting," level or at the very high level of technical and mathematical sophistication. There is very little room in the middle, and therefore it is very hard to come up with a suitable textbook that will do justice to the field and yet be accessible enough for upper-level undergraduates or beginning graduate students. "Quarks and Leptons" is one of those textbooks, and for the most part it fills this niche rather well. However, it does use a lot of Quantum Field Theory for the derivation of some important basic results, and does so almost from the very first few pages. In the light of that this is perhaps better suited for a graduate-level course than one aimed at the undergraduates, even the more advanced ones. As a college Physics professor at a good liberal-arts college I would certainly not use it in any course that I teach. I think a much more suitable textbook for upper level undergraduates would be David Griffiths' Introduction to Elementary Particles. Another thing that may be of concern to some is a rather limited number of problems in this textbook. All of them are dispersed throughout the text, and in many ways they create an unnecessary connecting material between various topics.

I would have also liked if this textbook were a bit more up to date. Granted, a lot of what goes by the name of Particle Physics these days is so speculative and out of touch with reality that it absolutely has no place in any textbook, but a few important topics (like neutrino masses) that have become well established would have been good topics to cover. All of this can still be achieved by going to supplementary materials, and the lack of these topics in no way diminishes the quality of this very solid textbook.

[فرهاد ذکاوت · Rating 4 out of 5]

Halzen and Martin's book has written in 80's. At that time, Particle Physics was growing with many ideas in theoretical physics between 30's to 70's. You can find many original masterpiece lectures and professional books, such as Weinberg, Weisskopf and other pioneers of theoretical physics.
But for new students there needed to be a new approach, called Phenomenology, to learn Particle Physics. This book in the one and i found it unique in its category. Till know you can find it great, if you would like to start a career in Particle Physics which has an important way to explore these days. For Phenomenology this book is the one you can start, and even go to some few papers and work on some serious subjects under supervisory of your professor in Master degree. A nice derive from Antiparticles in chapter 3 to the end. chapter 2 also in not bad, but obscure for a beginner which may be not familiar to group theory and main works of Prof. Gell-mann in current algebra.
The context is fluent and easy to follow, but you need to do exercises to get the ideas between calculations. I strongly recommend this book for anyone who would like work on high energy physics in his/her future career.

[Matteo Di giovanni · Rating 1 out of 5]

First of all let me tell you that I'm revewing this book as an undergraduate student who used it, or I may say was strongly recommended to use it by the professor, as a course textbook. So these are the impression of a student who expected to learn certain things during the course, not of an advanced graduate.

This book is definitively one of the worst books I've ever studied on. The word "introductory" in the title is extremely misleading because it's not introductory at all and it assumes prior advanced knowledge to the subject it should introduce, like elements of quantum field theories wich are completely ignored. And it's very badly written indeed.

Furthermore it's also very dispersive, disorganized and fragmentary. It presents results without telling you how to get them and without clearly explaing their meaning. So you continuosly need to check other books to undersatand. In the middle of important demonstrations it continuosly proposes you theoretical exercises which you can't solve because they're about things you still need to learn and the results are fundamental for that demonstrations that will follow so you loose a lot of time in trying to solve them when a clear, straight demonstration would be much more clear and helpful in a book defined "introductory"...
Moreover it doesn't give a glance of the experimental part of particle physics which, in my opinion, is as important as theory.

So as an introductory book it's not helpful at all. If you're looking for a clear and complete book in order to gain the basis of particle physics i'd suggest "Introduction to Elementary Particle Physics" by Alessandro Bettini or "Nuclear and Particle Physics" by W.E. Burcham and M. Jobes which both should do the job pretty well. They actually both give you theoretical and experimental background for advanced courses.

I'd rather suggest it as a reference book for people who already have and advanced background in particle physics and only need a revision of their knowledge. Not at all as an introductory book.

[Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent introduction to quantum field theory and the Standard model