Particle Physics in a nutshell

My field of of study is theoretical particle physics. If you have no idea what that is, my one line answer is usually something along the lines of: It is about calculating what happens when you collide atomic nuclei at enormous speeds. So, what do you get? Generally you get more atomic nuclei, rushing away in all directions. The aim of my branch of theoretical particle physics is to make precise predictions about what kinds The world is full of wonderful introductory texts about particle physics, and if you want to study particle physics, here are some I can recommend:

Start out by looking though my link collection . Even though everything may not be equally good, it is all free.

Particle Physics by Martin and Shaw is in my opinion a good, low level introductory text. It can, however, not stand alone.

Modern Elementary Particle Physics by Kane could be that supplement. It is a so-called classic (meaning that it's quite old...), but introduces some of the mere theoretical aspects quite good.

QED by Feynman is a good way to see some of the more (old fashioned) connections between classical physics and the stuff you learned in school and the physics behind elementary particle physics.

Once you actually get started, you will probably be handed some of the same textbooks as all students around the world have to go through. I belive that the most popular books on quantum field theory right now, are probably Peskin and Schroeder and Srednicki.

Talks

Here is an overview of talks and presentations, both historic and current. You can download slides as .pdf or latex source in a tarball (if possible complete with figures and all, just do pdflatex root.tex to compile it) if the talk is prepared using latex, .pdf otherwise. If you want to borrow a slide, please just remember to acknowledge me in some way.

Is the Standard Model any good? A two-hour lecture I did at Folkeuniversitetet as a part of a popular lecture series The World of Particles. It introduces gauge symmetry and some BSM physics models. The slides are in Danish. Get the .pdf of the Århus talk here.

Finding Higgs Particles using Image Analysis methods. A presentation I did in relaton to a course I took on image analysis and computer vision. Get the .pdf here or latex source here.

Presentation on the MPI @ LHC conference on 4.12.2013. Get the pdf here or latex source here.

Presentation on the MCnet meeting on 28.10.2013. Get the .pdf here or latex source here.

Presentation on Triple Gauge Couplings given at Lund University. Based on my masters thesis. Get the .pdf here or latex source here.

My masters defense. You can also go ahead and read my thesis. Get the .pdf here or latex source here.

I enjoy teaching very much and did in fact teach physics and math for high school, public school and at various after school offers, as well as being a teaching assistant at the university, while I studied for both my bachelors and my masters degree. As a Ph.D student I also do some teaching (mostly TAing computer labs). If you are a student looking for material for a lab you a currently doing with me, try to look in the first couple of entries. If you cannot find it there or on the official course home page, do not hesitate to contact me!.

Colours and Flavours

The course Colours and Flavours is part of the LU two-course treatise on phenomenology of the Standard Model, the other being a course on Monte Carlo Generators. The course starts with a rundown of the Standard Model, goes through mixing in the quark sector (CKM) and the neutrino sector. The bulk of the course treats various aspects of low energy QCD in various approximation schemes. The course ends with a rundown of SUSY.
The course home page. Still contains various info and a litterature list. The course book was Standard Model by Donnagie et al. Not recommendable as a first book on particle theory, but very good to give an overview of quite a lot of subjects within SM physics and various EFT.

Computer vision

The course on computer vision was a special course within the framework of the COMPUTE research school. The aim was to give graduate students from very diverse fields an introduction to computer vision theory and technology, and provide means to enable students to use these tools in own research. It was very interesting to meet and greet with other people from various fields. I especially recall a guy who made his Ph.D taking pictures of flora and fauna around the world, using stationary camaras, which were setup to take a picture a couple of times a day. He would then use computer vision methods to decide state of vegetation, time of year and so on, automatically from the pictures. I did a project where I separated Higgs particles from a very noisy background (the b-bbar channel), using various multivariate methods. I was very surprised how good the results were, and if anyone reading this would like to look at boosted Higgs particles in the b-bbar channel, they are very welcome to get my final report here or to look at my presentation . Multivariate methods are very fascinating to me, and probably one of the neccesary ingredients to make real AI, artificial intelligence. It will definitely be something I will pursue further at some point in the future.

A course Classical mechanics

I finished the LU course on classical mechinacs. Yay. The Lund University course on advanced classical mechanics, goes through the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formalism, covering all of(!) the tome of this subject by Goldstein et al., which you can read more about in my books section. There is not much interesting to say about such a course, but I did manage to do a bunch of the Goldstein exercises, which you can download (handwritten!) herebooks section. There is not much interesting to say about such a course, but I did manage to do a bunch of the Goldstein exercises, which you can download (handwritten!) , and .

Electrodynamics

The LU course on electrodynamics is an obligatory read-it-yourself-course, which basically consists of reading parts of the classic treatment by Jackson, and solving exercises. Oh the exercises. I am currently taking this course, and I will upload my course material, and a bit more of a lucid description one it's over with.

Monte Carlo and Molecular Dynamics

This is a course from the COMPUTE research school. It covers the basics of Monte Carlo and Molecular Dynamics simulation techniques, and then goes on to use the methods on five different real world cases (to be worked on in exercises), presented by an expert from each field. In the end, a project covering one of the areas in more rigorous detail was made.

Pedagogy

Ph.D students, who are teaching, must go through an introductory pedagogy course. Even though I have had such courses before, I thought it was a very interesting experience. Not least because the course was both international and interdisciplinary, so everybody had a nice opportunity to meet with graduate students from diffent fields and cultures. Turns out that every Ph.D student teaching at a university level, pretty much faces the same difficulties, regardless of subject. The course ended with all participants writing a short treatise on a pedagogical issue they are facing themselves, and possible solutions. I wrote about using kinesthetic (that means something you do with your body) exercises in physics teaching. It was quite fun to write, and I think it actually turned out ok. You can read it here.

Quantum field theory

The course on quantum field theory is a standard first-half of Peskin and Schroeder kind of course, much emphasis on calculations, and a lot of work done on hand-in exercises. This is a need-to-have course if you want to do anything related to particle physics, theoretical or experimental. I have a lot of lecture notes (handwritten), which you can get in a tarball here and of course some handin exercises which you can get in another tarball .

Statistical physics

The course on statistical physics covers both the basics of thermodynamics, introduces statistical physics, and then goes on to introduce some advanced methods for analysing the statistical physics of phase transition. The book is Statistical Mechanics by Chandler. The course features two rather large handin exercises. You can find my attempt at a solution here and . You can get my (handwritten) exam notes I think they can provide a pretty good idea about the contents of the course.