Abstract
This chapter introduces the basic techniques for the study of the intimate structure of matter, described in a historical context. After reading this chapter, you should understand the fundamental tools which led to the investigation and the description of the subatomic structure, and you should be able to compute the probability of occurrence of simple interaction and decay processes. A short reminder of the concepts of quantum mechanics and of special relativity needed to understand astroparticle physics is also provided.
This chapter introduces the basic techniques for the study of the intimate structure of matter, described in a historical context. After reading this chapter, you should understand the fundamental tools which led to the investigation and the description of the subatomic structure, and you should be able to compute the probability of occurrence of simple interaction and decay processes. A short reminder of the concepts of quantum mechanics and of special relativity needed to understand astroparticle physics is also provided.
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- 1.
Dimitri Mendeleev (1834–1907) was a Russian chemist born in Tobolsk, Siberia. He studied science in St. Petersburg, where he graduated in 1856 and became full professor in 1863. Mendeleev is best known for his work on the periodic table, published in Principles of Chemistry in 1869, but also, according to a myth popular in Russia, for establishing that the minimum alcoholic fraction of vodka should be 40 %— this requirement was easy to verify, as this is the minimum content at which an alcoholic solution can be ignited at room temperature.
- 2.
Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937) was a New Zealand-born physicist. In early works at McGill University in Canada, he proved that radioactivity involved the transmutation of one chemical element into another; he differentiated and named the \(\alpha \) (helium nuclei) and \(\beta \) (electrons) radiations. In 1907, Rutherford moved to Manchester, UK, where he discovered (and named) the proton. In 1908, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances.” He became director of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University in 1919. Under his leadership, the neutron was discovered by James Chadwick in 1932. Also in 1932, his students John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton split for the first time the atom with a beam of particles. Rutherford was buried near Newton in Westminster Abbey, London. The chemical element rutherfordium—atomic number 104—was named after him in 1997.
- 3.
Erwin Schrödinger was an Austrian physicist who obtained fundamental results in the fields of quantum theory, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, physics of dielectrics, color theory, electrodynamics, cosmology, and cosmic ray physics. He also paid great attention to the philosophical aspects of science, re-evaluating ancient and oriental philosophical concepts, and to biology and to the meaning of life. He formulated the famous paradox of the Schrödinger cat. He shared with P.A.M. Dirac the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics “for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory.”
- 4.
Enrico Fermi (Rome 1901–Chicago 1954) studied in Pisa and became full professor of Analytical Mechanics in Florence in 1925, and then of Theoretical Physics in Rome from 1926. Soon he surrounded himself by a group of brilliant young collaborators, the so-called via Panisperna boys (E. Amaldi, E. Majorana, B. Pontecorvo, F. Rasetti, E. Segré, O. D’Agostino). For Fermi, theory and experiment were inseparable. In 1934, he discovered that slow neutrons catalyzed a certain type of nuclear reactions, which made it possible to derive energy from nuclear fission. In 1938, Fermi went to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize, awarded for his fundamental work on neutrons, and from there he emigrated to the USA, where he became an American citizen in open dispute with the Italian racial laws. He actively participated in the Manhattan Project for the use of nuclear power for the atomic bomb, but spoke out against the use of this weapon on civilian targets. Immediately after the end of World War II, he devoted himself to theoretical physics of elementary particles and to the origin of cosmic rays. Few scientists of the twentieth century impacted as profoundly as Fermi in different areas of physics: Fermi stands for elegance and power of thought in the group of immortal geniuses like Einstein, Landau, Heisenberg, and later Feynman.
- 5.
Depending on the textbook, you might encounter the notation \(H_{if}\) or \(H_{fi}\).
- 6.
Hideki Yukawa (Tokyo, 1907–Kyoto, 1981) , professor at Kyoto University, gave fundamental contributions to quantum mechanics. For his research he won the prize Nobel Prize for Physics in 1949.
- 7.
James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) was a Scottish physicist. His most prominent achievement was formulating classical electromagnetic theory. Maxwell’s equations, published in 1865, demonstrate that electricity, magnetism, and light are all manifestations of the same phenomenon: the electromagnetic field. Maxwell also contributed to the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution, which gives the statistical distribution of velocities in a classical perfect gas in equilibrium. Einstein had a photograph of Maxwell, one of Faraday and one of Newton in his office.
- 8.
Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (1853–1928) was a Dutch physicist who made important contributions in electromagnetism. He also wrote explicitly the equations subsequently used by Albert Einstein to describe the transformation of space and time coordinates in different inertial reference frames. He was awarded the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics.
- 9.
Ludvig Lorenz (1829–1891) , not to be confused with Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, was a Danish mathematician and physicist, professor at the Military Academy in Copenhagen.
- 10.
For reasons related only to metrology (reproducibility and accuracy of the definition) in the standard SI the unit of electric current, the ampere A, is used instead of the coulomb; the two definitions are however conceptually equivalent.
- 11.
\(\hbar c\simeq 1.97\times 10^{-13}\mathrm{{MeV \, m}=3.15\times 10^{-26}\mathrm{{J \, m.}}}\)
- 12.
A classical derivation of this formula proceeds by computing the radius for which the escape velocity from a spherical distribution of mass with zero angular momentum is equal to c.
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De Angelis, A., Pimenta, M. (2018). Basics of Particle Physics. In: Introduction to Particle and Astroparticle Physics. Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78181-5_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78181-5_2
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