Candidacy Topic - Nuclear and Particle
Special relativity and important ideas from nonrelativistic quantum mechanics:
Relativistic kinematics, Lorentz transformations, Lorentz invariants
Fermi's golden rule, perturbation theory, addition of angular momenta
Passage of radiation through matter and detectors:
Rutherford scattering, Compton scattering, energy loss due to Ionization, multiple scattering, electromagnetic and hadronic showers
Basic principles of operation of the various detectors used in nuclear and particle physics and what determines their resolution.
Dosimetry
Nuclear physics:
Fermi gas model, liquid drop model, binding energy per nucleon, shell model, basics of nuclear spectroscopy, nuclear form factors
Classification of the hadrons and conservation laws
Construction of meson and baryon wave functions, spectroscopy and spectroscopic notation.
Baryon number, lepton number, lepton flavor, hypercharge, isospin, C, P, CP, and CPT.
Specifically for Heavy Ion students:
Basics of Thermodynamics
Basics of Hydrodynamics
Phenomena at Heavy Ion experiments
Symmetries and groups, role of gauge symmetries in field theories of interactions:
U(1) and electromagnetism
SU(2), spin, isospin, Electroweak interaction
SU(3) and color - QCD
Photon and massive vector boson propagators
Connection between bosons and the generators of symmetry groups
Relativistic Quantum Mechanics:
Dirac equation, spinors, antiparticles, bilinear covariants
Feynman diagrams, Feynman rules
Photon polarization
Be able to discuss qualitatively loops, running coupling constants, renormalization
Phenomena:
Hadronic structure, parton distribution functions. Bjorken scaling
Experimental evidence for QCD, R ratio in e+e-
Weak interactions, V-A, the weak interaction current
CKM matrix, K and B meson mixing, CP violation
Neutrino masses and mixing
Specific to Particle Physics students:
Phenomena at collider experiments
Theories beyond the standard model (should know what some of them are and give examples of what to look for in experiments)