INT 84 BK - Fall 2021
Honors Seminar: Great Experiments of Particle Physics

Meeting coordinates: Thursday 3:00-4:50 HSSB 4202
http://hep.ucsb.edu/people/claudio/Int-84bk-f21


Instructor:
 Claudio Campagnari
Email:
 claudio@physics.ucsb.edu
Office:
 Broida 3001.  Phone 805-893-3742.
Office Hours:
 By appointment, or just drop by


Administrative Assistant:
 Debbie Ceder
Email:
 dla@physics.ucsb.edu
Office:
 Broida 5014.  Phone 805-893-2058

Note: the main door to my office is in the department administrative office suite which, because of the Covid situation, is usually locked to keep the traffic down.  You can use the other door: go right as you come out of the elevators on the 3rd floor of Broida, go through the glass doors, my other office door is immediately to the right, opposite the ladies room.  Just knock....

An important statement from the instructor and the Physics Department about our expectations for professional behavior and suggestions on how to deal with problems.


Welcome to this honors seminar.  The goal of this course is to provide a gentle introduction to particle physics, the branch of physics that deals with the most fundamental building blocks of matter and their interactions.  No prior knowledge of physics is required.  This is a seminar, not a lecture course, so the degree of success of this course will depend on your engagement and participation.  We will base ourselves on the book by Cindy Schwartz A tour of the Subatomic Zoo (3rd edition).  This book is available for free in the UCSB library as a pdf/epub/kindle download.

We will structure the class as follows.  We will go through the chapters in Cindy's book, one chapter per week.  Each week one (or maybe two) students will prepare a ~ 30 minute presentation on the chapter.  I will be available as needed to help preparing the presentation.  Following on the presentation we will have a Q&A session, and depending on how it goes I will expand on the discussion.

A word about grades.  This class is supposed to be letter-graded, but I do not want the stress about getting a good grade to spoil what we are trying to do.  If you take the presentation seriously (when your turn comes) and if you participate in the discussions at some reasonable level, you will get a good grade.  Let's turn the grading pressure off, OK?