The search for neutrinoless double beta decay is one of the highest priority areas in particle physics today; it could provide insights to the nature of neutrino masses (currently not explained by the Standard Model) as well as how the universe survived its early stages. One promising experimental approach involves the use of large volumes of isotope-loaded liquid scintillator, but new techniques for background identification and suppression must be developed in order to reach the required sensitivity levels and clearly distinguish the signal. The results from this thesis constitute a significant advance in this area, laying the groundwork for several highly effective and novel approaches based on a detailed evaluation of state-of-the-art detector characteristics. This well written thesis includes a particularly clear and comprehensive description of the theoretical motivations as well as impressively demonstrating the effective use of diverse statistical techniques. The professionally constructed signal extraction framework contains clever algorithmic solutions to efficient error propagation in multi-dimensional space. In general, the techniques developed in this work will have a notable impact on the field.

The book aims to explain the historical development of particle physics, with special emphasis on CERN and collider physics. It describes in detail the LHC accelerator and its detectors, describing the science involved as well as the sociology of big collaborations, culminating with the discovery of the Higgs boson. Readers are led step-by-step to understanding why we do particle physics, as well as the tools and problems involved in the field. It provides an insider's view on the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider.

The book aims to explain the historical development of particle physics, with special emphasis on CERN and collider physics. It describes in detail the LHC accelerator and its detectors, describing the science involved as well as the sociology of big collaborations, culminating with the discovery of the Higgs boson. Readers are led step-by-step to understanding why we do particle physics, as well as the tools and problems involved in the field. It provides an insider's view on the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider.

This volume is a compilation of the lectures at TASI 2014. The coverage focuses on modern calculational techniques for scattering amplitudes, and on the phenomenology of QCD in hadronic collisions. Introductions to flavor physics, dark matter, and physics beyond the Standard Model are also provided. The lectures are accessible to graduate students at the initial stages of their research careers.

This book provides a broad introduction to the physics and technology of the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC). This new configuration of the LHC is one of the major accelerator projects for the next 20 years and will give new life to the LHC after its first 15-year operation. Not only will it allow more precise measurements of the Higgs boson and of any new particles that might be discovered in the next LHC run, but also extend the mass limit reach for detecting new particles. The HL-LHC is based on the innovative accelerator magnet technologies capable of generating 11-13 Tesla fields, with effectiveness enhanced by use of the new Achromatic Telescopic Squeezing scheme, and other state-of-the-art accelerator technologies, such as superconducting compact RF crab cavities, advanced collimation concepts, and novel power technology based on high temperature superconducting links.The book consists of a series of chapters touching on all issues of technology and design, and each chapter can be read independently. The first few chapters give a summary of the whole project, of the physics motivation and of the accelerator challenges. The subsequent chapters cover the novel technologies, the new configurations of LHC and of its injectors as well as the expected operational implications. Altogether, the book brings the reader to the heart of technologies for the leading edge accelerator and gives insights into next generation hadron colliders.

Since the discovery of neutrino oscillations neutrino physics has become an interesting field of research in physics. They imply that neutrino must have a small mass and that the neutrinos, coupled to the charged leptons, are mixtures of the mass eigenstates, analogous to the flavor mixing of the quarks. The mixing angles for the quarks are small, but for the leptons two of the mixing angles are large. The masses of the three neutrinos must be very small, less than 1 eV, but from the oscillation experiments we only know the mass differences - the absolute masses are still unknown. Also we do not know, if the masses of the neutrinos are Dirac masses, as the masses of the charged leptons and of the quarks, or whether they are Majorana masses.In this volume, an overview of the present state of research in neutrino physics is given by well-known experimentalists and theorists. The contents - originated from talks and discussions at a recent conference addressing some of the most pressing open questions in neutrino physics - range from the oscillation experiments to CP-violation for leptons, to texture zero mass matrices and to the role of neutrinos in astrophysics and cosmology.

The embedding method is a powerful theoretical and computational technique used in exploring surface and interface electronic structure, adsorption, physics of nanostructures, molecular electronics, plasmonics and photonics. Supplemented with demonstration programmes, code and examples this book provides a thorough review of the method

The book is a compilation of the most important experimental results achieved during the past 60 years at CERN - from the mid-1950s to the latest discovery of the Higgs particle. Covering the results from the early accelerators at CERN to those most recent at the LHC, the contents provide an excellent review of the achievements of this outstanding laboratory. Not only presented is the impressive scientific progress achieved during the past six decades, but also demonstrated is the special way in which successful international collaboration exists at CERN.

The book is a compilation of the most important experimental results achieved during the past 60 years at CERN - from the mid-1950s to the latest discovery of the Higgs particle. Covering the results from the early accelerators at CERN to those most recent at the LHC, the contents provide an excellent review of the achievements of this outstanding laboratory. Not only presented is the impressive scientific progress achieved during the past six decades, but also demonstrated is the special way in which successful international collaboration exists at CERN.

This book offers an elementary and unified introduction to the non-perturbative results obtained in relativistic quantum field theory based on classical soliton and instanton solutions. Such solutions are derived for a variety of models and classified by topological indices. The methods are then developed for quantizing solitons to obtain quantum particles. Vacuum tunneling, &ugr;-vacua and the dilute-instanton-gas approximation are described in detail. Other instanton effects related to quark-quark forces, confinement, the U(1) problem and Borel summability are also discussed. The emphasis is on presenting the basic ideas in a simple pedagogical way. Technical tools like functional methods, Grassman integrals, homotopy classification, collective co-ordinates etc. are developed ab initio.
The presentation of this work is kept at a fairly simple level and ideas are developed through illustrative examples. Techniques not covered in older field theory textbooks, such as functional integral methods, are presented in some detail to the necessary extent. These techniques are important in their own right. Although the book is mainly addressed to particle physicists and quantum field theorists, several portions will be of relevance to other branches of physics, particularly statistical mechanics. These include three chapters devoted to deriving classical soliton and instanton solutions and one on collective co-ordinates, as well as sections devoted to general techniques.

In 1981 Mary K Gaillard became the first woman on the physics faculty at the University of California at Berkeley. Her career as a theoretical physicist spanned the period from the inception - in the late 1960s and early 1970s - of what is now known as the Standard Model of particle physics and its experimental confirmation, culminating with the discovery of the Higgs particle in 2012. A Singularly Unfeminine Profession recounts Gaillard's experiences as a woman in a very male-dominated field, while tracing the development of the Standard Model as she witnessed it and participated in it. The generally nurturing environment of her childhood and college years, as well as experiences as an undergraduate in particle physics laboratories and as a graduate student at Columbia University - which cemented her passion for particle physics - left her unprepared for the difficulties that she confronted as a second year graduate student in Paris, and later at CERN, another particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. The development of the Standard Model, as well as attempts to go beyond it and aspects of early universe physics, are described through the lens of Gaillard's own work, in a language written for a lay audience.

In 1981 Mary K Gaillard became the first woman on the physics faculty at the University of California at Berkeley. Her career as a theoretical physicist spanned the period from the inception - in the late 1960s and early 1970s - of what is now known as the Standard Model of particle physics and its experimental confirmation, culminating with the discovery of the Higgs particle in 2012. A Singularly Unfeminine Profession recounts Gaillard's experiences as a woman in a very male-dominated field, while tracing the development of the Standard Model as she witnessed it and participated in it. The generally nurturing environment of her childhood and college years, as well as experiences as an undergraduate in particle physics laboratories and as a graduate student at Columbia University - which cemented her passion for particle physics - left her unprepared for the difficulties that she confronted as a second year graduate student in Paris, and later at CERN, another particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. The development of the Standard Model, as well as attempts to go beyond it and aspects of early universe physics, are described through the lens of Gaillard's own work, in a language written for a lay audience.

Proceedings of the 51st Course of the International School of Subnuclear Physics on 'Reflections on the next step for LHC', Erice, 24 June - 3 July 2013.

This unique volume presents an original approach to physical acoustics with additional emphasis on the most useful surface acoustic waves on solids. The study is based on foundational work of Leon Brillouin, and application of the celebrated invariance theorem of Emmy Noether to an element of volume that is representative of the wave motion.This approach provides an easy interpretation of typical wave motions of physical acoustics in bulk, at surfaces, and across interfaces, in the form of the motion of associated quasi-particles. This type of motion, Newtonian or not, depends on the wave motion considered, and on the original modeling of the continuum that supports it. After a thoughtful review of Brillouin's fundamental ideas related to radiative stresses, wave momentum and action, and the necessary reminder on modern nonlinear continuum thermomechanics, invariance theory and techniques of asymptotics, a variety of situations and models illustrates the power and richness of the approach and its strong potential in applications. Elasticity, piezoelectricity and new models of continua with nonlinearity, viscosity and some generalized features (microstructure, weak or strong nonlocality) or unusual situations (bounding surface with energy, elastic thin film glued on a surface waveguide), are considered, exhibiting thus the versatility of the approach.This original book offers an innovative vision and treatment of the problems of wave propagation in deformable solids. It opens up new horizons in the theoretical and applied facets of physical acoustics.

Features Covers both basic introductory topics, in addition to more advanced content Accompanied by over 200 problems starting from group algebra to the derivation of Migdal-Makeenko equations, Kim - Shifman - Vainshtein - Zakharov axion, and gluon + gluon to Higgs cross section, etc. Solutions are incorporated into the chapters to test understanding

'Harald Fritzsch and Murray Gell-Mann, the two fathers of quantum chromodynamics, look back at the events that led to the discovery, and eventually acceptance, of quarks as constituent particles ... it is always worthwhile to reminisce about those times when theoretical physicists were truly eclectic, these stories are the testimony of a very active era, in which theoretical and experimental discoveries rapidly chased one another ... Of central importance now is the understanding of the composition of our universe, the dark matter and dark energy, the hierarchy of masses and forces, and a consistent quantum framework of unification of all forces of nature, including gravity. The closing contributions of the book put this venture in the context of today's high-energy physics programme, and make a connection to the most popular ideas in high-energy physics today, including supersymmetry, unification and string theory.'CERN CourierToday it is known that the atomic nuclei are composed of smaller constituents, the quarks. A quark is always bound with two other quarks, forming a baryon or with an antiquark, forming a meson. The quark model was first postulated in 1964 by Murray Gell-Mann - who coined the name "quark" from James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake - and by George Zweig, who then worked at CERN. In the present theory of strong interactions - Quantum Chromodynamics proposed by H Fritzsch and Gell-Mann in 1972 - the forces that bind the quarks together are due to the exchange of eight gluons.On the 50th anniversary of the quark model, this invaluable volume looks back at the developments and achievements in the elementary particle physics that eventuated from that beautiful model. Written by an international team of distinguished physicists, each of whom have made major developments in the field, the volume provides an essential overview of the present state to the academics and researchers.

'Harald Fritzsch and Murray Gell-Mann, the two fathers of quantum chromodynamics, look back at the events that led to the discovery, and eventually acceptance, of quarks as constituent particles ... it is always worthwhile to reminisce about those times when theoretical physicists were truly eclectic, these stories are the testimony of a very active era, in which theoretical and experimental discoveries rapidly chased one another ... Of central importance now is the understanding of the composition of our universe, the dark matter and dark energy, the hierarchy of masses and forces, and a consistent quantum framework of unification of all forces of nature, including gravity. The closing contributions of the book put this venture in the context of today's high-energy physics programme, and make a connection to the most popular ideas in high-energy physics today, including supersymmetry, unification and string theory.'CERN CourierToday it is known that the atomic nuclei are composed of smaller constituents, the quarks. A quark is always bound with two other quarks, forming a baryon or with an antiquark, forming a meson. The quark model was first postulated in 1964 by Murray Gell-Mann - who coined the name "quark" from James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake - and by George Zweig, who then worked at CERN. In the present theory of strong interactions - Quantum Chromodynamics proposed by H Fritzsch and Gell-Mann in 1972 - the forces that bind the quarks together are due to the exchange of eight gluons.On the 50th anniversary of the quark model, this invaluable volume looks back at the developments and achievements in the elementary particle physics that eventuated from that beautiful model. Written by an international team of distinguished physicists, each of whom have made major developments in the field, the volume provides an essential overview of the present state to the academics and researchers.

The idea of colliding two particle beams to fully exploit the energy of accelerated particles was first proposed by Rolf Wideroee, who in 1943 applied for a patent on the collider concept and was awarded the patent in 1953. The first three colliders - AdA in Italy, CBX in the US, and VEP-1 in the then Soviet Union - came to operation about 50 years ago in the mid-1960s. A number of other colliders followed.Over the past decades, colliders defined the energy frontier in particle physics. Different types of colliers - proton-proton, proton-antiproton, electron-positron, electron-proton, electron-ion and ion-ion colliders - have played complementary roles in fully mapping out the constituents and forces in the Standard Model (SM). We are now at a point where all predicted SM constituents of matter and forces have been found, and all the latest ones were found at colliders. Colliders also play a critical role in advancing beam physics, accelerator research and technology development. It is timely that RAST Volume 7 is dedicated to Colliders.

These proceedings are devoted to a wide variety of items, both in theory and experiment, of particle physics such as neutrino and astroparticle physics, tests of the standard model and beyond, and hadron physics. Also covered are gravitation and cosmology, and physics from present and future accelerators.

The remarkable recent discovery of the Higgs boson at the CERN Large Hadron Collider completed the Standard Model of particle physics and has paved the way for understanding the physics which may lie beyond it. String/M theory has emerged as a broad framework for describing a plethora of diverse physical systems, which includes condensed matter systems, gravitational systems as well as elementary particle physics interactions. If string/M theory is to be considered as a candidate theory of Nature, it must contain an effectively four-dimensional universe among its solutions that is indistinguishable from our own. In these solutions, the extra dimensions of string/M theory are "compactified" on tiny scales which are often comparable to the Planck length. String phenomenology is the branch of string/M theory that studies such solutions, relates their properties to data, and aims to answer many of the outstanding questions of particle physics beyond the Standard Model.This book contains perspectives on string phenomenology from some of the leading experts in the field. Contributions will range from pedagogical general overviews and perspectives to more technical reviews. We hope that the reader will get a sense of the significant progress that has been made in the field in recent years (e.g. in the topic of moduli stabilization) as well as the topics currently being researched, outstanding problems and some perspectives for the future.

The remarkable recent discovery of the Higgs boson at the CERN Large Hadron Collider completed the Standard Model of particle physics and has paved the way for understanding the physics which may lie beyond it. String/M theory has emerged as a broad framework for describing a plethora of diverse physical systems, which includes condensed matter systems, gravitational systems as well as elementary particle physics interactions. If string/M theory is to be considered as a candidate theory of Nature, it must contain an effectively four-dimensional universe among its solutions that is indistinguishable from our own. In these solutions, the extra dimensions of string/M theory are "compactified" on tiny scales which are often comparable to the Planck length. String phenomenology is the branch of string/M theory that studies such solutions, relates their properties to data, and aims to answer many of the outstanding questions of particle physics beyond the Standard Model.This book contains perspectives on string phenomenology from some of the leading experts in the field. Contributions will range from pedagogical general overviews and perspectives to more technical reviews. We hope that the reader will get a sense of the significant progress that has been made in the field in recent years (e.g. in the topic of moduli stabilization) as well as the topics currently being researched, outstanding problems and some perspectives for the future.

The book collects a few articles on QCD and heavy quarks by close colleagues and friends of Prof. Dr. Nikolai Uraltsev, who passed away early and unexpectedly in 2013. Nikolai Uraltsev was an excellent theorist and a wonderful friend, and this book is to honor his ground breaking work in fundamental physics, such as CP violation, instantons and renormalons in QCD, and in particular his work on the heavy quark expansion.The book summarizes some aspects of QCD from a special perspective, which is relevant for the applications of QCD in the context of weak interactions. This includes CP violation in hadronic processes as well as the hadronic matrix elements in weak decays. The reader will get insight into the special way of understanding fundamental physics, which was peculiar of our former colleague Nikolai Uraltsev.

This proceedings volume, for the symposium in honor of Junwen Wang's 70th anniversary, is dedicated to his many important achievements in the field of accelerator physics.It includes the discussions of recent advances and challenging problems in the field of high gradient accelerating structure development.