(Ebook) Fundamental Forces of Nature The Story of Gauge Fields 1st Edition by Kerson Huang ISBN 9789812706447 9812706445

1. What Makes the World Tick?

1.1 Motion

1.2 Gravitation

1.3 The force field

1.4 Equivalence principle

1.5 Energy

1.6 Momentum

1.7 Least action

1.8 Newton canonized

1.9 The mechanical universe

2. Electromagnetism

2.1 Electric field

2.2 Lines of force

2.3 Multipoles

2.4 Scalar potential

2.5 Electric current

2.6 Magnetic field

2.7 Vector potential

2.8 Electromagnetic induction

2.9 Maxwell’s equations

2.10 Radiation

3. The Vacuum is the Medium

3.1 The ether

3.2 Reference frames

3.3 The light cone

3.4 Lorentz transformation

3.5 Relativity of space and time

3.6 Four vectors

3.7 E=mc2

3.8 Faster than light?

3.9 Maxwell’s true form

3.10 The gauge field

3.11 Who wrote these signs

3.12 Lorentz and Einstein

4. Let There be Light

4.1 Local gauge invariance

4.2 A creation

4.3 The gauge principle

4.4 Hermann Weyl

4.5 And there was light

5. Heroic Age: The Struggle for Quantum Theory

5.1 Alien signals

5.2 Bohr’s atom

5.3 Purely imaginary

5.4 Quantum mechanics

5.5 The wave function

5.6 Quantum theory and relativity

5.7 Silly question

6. Quantum Reality

6.1 The uncertainty relation

6.2 Wave nature of matter

6.3 Entanglement

6.4 All virtual realities

6.5 The quantum century

6.6 The Waste Lecture

7. What is Charge?

7.1 The quantum gauge

7.2 Covariant derivative

7.3 Aharonov–Bohm experiment

7.4 U(1)

7.5 Quantum gauge principle

7.6 Global vs. local gauge invariance

8. The Zen of Rotation

8.1 Rotations do not commute

8.2 Hamilton’s flash of insight

8.3 Generators of rotation

8.4 Groups

8.5 SU(2): fundamental representation

8.6 The adjoint representation

9. Yang–Mills Field: Non-Commuting Charges

9.1 Gauging SU(2)

9.2 Picturing local gauge invariance

9.3 Maxwell generalized

9.4 Gauge photons

9.5 Magnetic charge

9.6 Monopole: the gauge hedgehog

9.7 Into the deep freeze

10. Photons Real and Virtual

10.1 Real photons

10.2 Quantum jumps

10.3 Virtual photons

11. Creation and Annihilation

11.1 The quantum field

11.2 Particle and antiparticle

11.3 The Dirac equation

11.4 The Dirac sea

11.5 Reversing time

11.6 Feynman diagram

11.7 The fine-structure constant

12. The Dynamical Vacuum

12.1 QED

12.2 Interaction vertex

12.3 Self-energy

12.4 Vacuum polarization

12.5 The dressed electron

12.6 The ultraviolet catastrophe

12.7 Reality of vacuum fluctuations

12.8 When physicists were heroes

12.9 The enduring QED

13. Elementary Particles

13.1 Beginnings

13.2 Bosons and fermions

13.3 Spin and statistics

13.4 Interactions

14. The Fall of Parity

14.1 Dawn of the post-modern era

14.2 Neutrino: a left-handed screw

14.3 CP

14.4 Is nothing sacred?

15. The Particle Explosion

15.1 The accelerator boom

15.2 Darkness at noon

15.3 The ontological bootstrap

15.4 The ultimate temperature

15.5 Echos of an era

16. Quarks

16.1 Strangeness

16.2 Octet and decaplet

16.3 The eightfold way

16.4 “Three quarks for Muster Mark!”

16.5 Charm and beyond

16.6 Partons

16.7 Charmonium

16.8 Color

17. All Interactions are Local

17.1 Yang–Mills awakens

17.2 Unifying electromagnetic and weak interactions

17.3 Generating mass

17.4 Making the photon

17.5 Historical note

17.6 The lepton-quark family

17.7 QCD

17.8 Two more families: who ordered them?

17.9 The standard model

18. Broken Symmetry

18.1 What is mass?

18.2 How a magnet gets magnetized

18.3 The order parameter

18.4 The Goldstone mode

18.5 Superconductivity: the photon gets mass

18.6 Historical note

19. Quark Confinement

19.1 Monopole confinement

19.2 Electric flux tube

19.3 The QCD string

19.4 Asymptotic freedom

20. Hanging Threads of Silk

20.1 Mass

20.2 Chirality

20.3 The pion as Goldstone boson

20.4 PCAC

20.5 The triangle anomaly

20.6 Lepton-quark family structure

20.7 Waiting for closure

21. The World in a Grain of Sand

21.1 A matter of scale

21.2 Renormalization

21.3 The running coupling

21.4 Fixed point: theoretical model

21.5 UV fixed point: QCD

21.6 IR fixed point: QED

21.7 Crossover: scientific revolution

22. In the Space of All Possible Theories

22.1 The physics is in the cutoff

22.2 The RG trajectory

22.3 The space of Lagrangians

22.4 Of time and temperature

22.5 Tian Wen

22.6 Tian Wen updated

Epilogue: Beauty is Truth

Appendix. Nobel Prize in Physics

Annual listing

Alphabetical listing

Name Index

Subject Index