So I used the book “The standard model: a primer” by Cliff Burgess and Guy Moore for various of my lectures this past year. I found that the book was very enjoyable to read and it covered the topic in a thoughful way. I would definitely recommend its purchase to those who are looking to a modern introduction to the Standard model of Particle Physics phenomenology book. It is hard to find a book that is up to date on this subject.
I particularly liked the treatment of initial state radiation in the electroweak theory and the general layout of the book. On my wish list I would have liked to see more about parton distributions and their evolution (they are covered, but in a cursory way). I also felt that the description of the effective lagrangians of mesons was a little too short. This also applies to the treatment of various loop corrections to electroweak precision measurements . The title of the book says it: it is a primer, not an encyclopedia.
I have issues with some of the notation used in the book. It makes reading the rest of the literature in the subject difficult. In part it is that the authors choose opposite conventions for gamma matrices relative to various other books. Reconciling notation is an endless task.
If you can wait, wait until a second edition comes out. The book has many typos that should be corrected in the future editions. The first one I found was quite egregious. It stated that the Hilbert state of multi-particle states Fock-space was a tensor product of the many-particle sub-Hilbert spaces of the form
Whereas it should be a direct sum
This is on page one. If one knows a bit about the subject, it is not hard to correct for those mishaps, but it takes some continuous effort to do so. This is why I suggest waiting for a second edition. Overall, I still think this is a very worthwhile book to have in ones library. If the readers have read this book, I would like them to share their opinions.
What was the target audience? many SM courses have mixed audience of theorists and experimentalists, who tend to have slightly different backgrounds and slightly different goals. Is this text good for that purpose?
Hi Moshe:
It was mostly theorists and the book was not required. I think it serves the needs of theory students slightly better than the needs of experimental students, but it would work for both.
I don’t have the book, but I’m not sure I understand the bit about the tensor product versus the direct sum.
If I have n non-interacting particles, the Hilbert space is the n-fold tensor product of 1-particle Hilbert spaces (symmetrized or antisymmetrized, if the particles are identical).
I think David was referring to the Fock space.
Oh. Yeah. That would make more sense …
Indeed, that is correct Aaron. I fixed the post so that it reads better.