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Particle physics (also high energy physics) is the branch of physics that studies the nature of the particles that constitute matter and radiation. Although the word "particle" can refer to various types of very small objects (e.g. protons, gas particles, or even household dust), "particle physics" usually investigates the irreducibly smallest detectable particles and the fundamental interactions necessary to explain their behavior.

• ## 2: Experimental Tools

In this chapter we shall concentrate on the experimental tools used in nuclear and particle physics. Mainly the present ones, but it is hard to avoid discussing some of the history.

• ## 4: Nuclear Models

There are two important classed of nuclear models: single particle and microscopic models, that concentrate on the individual nucleons and their interactions, and collective models, where we just model the nucleus as a collective of nucleons, often a nuclear &fllig;uid drop.
• ## 5: Basic Concepts of Theoretical Particle Physics

We now come to the &filig;rst hard part of the class. We’ll try to learn what insights we can gain from the equation governing relativistic quantum mechanics.
• ## 6: The Four Fundamental Forces

The fundamental forces are normally divided in four groups, of the four so-called “fundamental” forces.
• ## 7: Symmetries and Particle Physics

Symmetries in physics provide a great fascination to us – one of the hang-ups of mankind. We can recognize a symmetry easily, and they provide a great tool to classify shapes and patterns. There is an important area of mathematics called group theory, where one studies the transformations under which an object is symmetric.
• ## 8: Symmetries of the theory of strong interactions

The &filig;rst time people realised the key role of symmetries was in the plethora of particles discovered using the &filig;rst accelerators. Many of those were composite particle (to be explained later) bound by the strong interaction.
• ## 9: Relativistic Kinematics

Einstein’s idea of the equivalence between mass and energy plays an extremely fundamental role in this &filig;eld of physics. In order for this to be possible we typically need processes that occur at velocities near the light velocity c , so that the kinematics of these processes requires relativity. In this chapter we shall succinctly introduce the few necessary concepts of relativistic kinematics.