[PDF] Quarks and Leptons: An Introductory Course in Modern Particle Physics Francis Halzen, Alan D. Martin

Particle Physics is one of those branches of Physics that can be taught either at a very pedestrian, “stamp-collecting,” level or at the very high level of technical and mathematical sophistication. There is very little room in the middle, and therefore it is very hard to come up with a suitable textbook that will do justice to the field and yet be accessible enough for upper-level undergraduates or beginning graduate students. “Quarks and Leptons” is one of those textbooks, and for the most part it fills this niche rather well. However, it does use a lot of Quantum Field Theory for the derivation of some important basic results, and does so almost from the very first few pages. In the light of that this is perhaps better suited for a graduate-level course than one aimed at the undergraduates, even the more advanced ones. As a college Physics professor at a good liberal-arts college I would certainly not use it in any course that I teach. I think a much more suitable textbook for upper level undergraduates would be David Griffiths’ Introduction to Elementary Particles. Another thing that may be of concern to some is a rather limited number of problems in this textbook. All of them are dispersed throughout the text, and in many ways they create an unnecessary connecting material between various topics.I would have also liked if this textbook were a bit more up to date. Granted, a lot of what goes by the name of Particle Physics these days is so speculative and out of touch with reality that it absolutely has no place in any textbook, but a few important topics (like neutrino masses) that have become well established would have been good topics to cover. All of this can still be achieved by going to supplementary materials, and the lack of these topics in no way diminishes the quality of this very solid textbook.