Feynman Diagrams and Electron-Positron Annihilation

Daniel V. Schroeder, Department of Physics, Weber State University

This is the web site for a set of curricular materials that I'm working on. The material could be used as a course module (four or five weeks long) in a junior- or senior-level course in applications of quantum physics, or as a text for a one-credit-hour guided reading course.

The goal is to make the central principles and tools of elementary particle physics accessible to the typical undergraduate physics student. In order to keep the material short and accessible, I'll focus on the simplest types of particle interactions, making no attempt to survey the whole field of particle physics or to present the subject historically.

Outline (tentative)

Electron-Positron Colliders
- Accelerators and Storage Rings
- Detectors
- Inventory of Detectable Particles
- Cross Sections, Luminosities, and Event Rates
Theoretical Foundations
- Units
- Four-Vectors
- The Klein-Gordon Equation
- Quantum Amplitudes
- Fourier Transforms and Delta Functions
Electron-Positron Scattering (Click here to download a draft.)
- The Cross Section
- Feynman Diagrams
- Feynman Rules
- The Calculation
- Spin
- Higher-Order Diagrams
Extensions and Further Examples
- Turning Amplitudes into Probabilities
- Other QED Processes
- Inventory of Particles and Interactions
- Electron-Positron Annihilation into Hadrons
- Lepton-Hadron and Hadron-Hadron Collisions

Here is a large (7 MB) pdf file of the slides from a talk I recently gave that summarizes much of this material.

Last modified on 30 October 2002.