94254 - Theory of the Standard Model: Advanced Topics

Academic Year 2024/2025

  • Docente: Fabio Maltoni
  • Credits: 6
  • SSD: FIS/02
  • Language: English

Learning outcomes

This course provides an in-depth and critical view on the key aspects of the Standard Model of particle physics. It presents its successes and its limitations, theoretical as well as experimental, and the main avenues currently explored to go beyond it. At the end of the course the students will be able to understand the open problems at the frontier of high energy physics and will have developed the theoretical skills necessary to tackle them.

Course contents

The course provides advanced knowledge of the theory of the Standard Model of elementary particle with open questions from a theoretical and phenomenological perspective.The course is divided into three parts.

The first part places a focus on neutrino physics (Neutrinos in the Standard Model. Neutrino oscillations in vacuum and in matter. Current status and open questions for the future. Nature and masses of neutrinos: Majorana and Dirac particles. Origin of neutrino masses beyond the Standard Model. The baryon asymmetry and leptogenesis. The problem of flavour in the lepton sector. Neutrinos in the Universe. Brief overview of dark matter).

The second part is on precision Standard Model physics (Lagrangian of the SM. Custodial Symmetry and the rho parameter. Linear and non-linear EW symmetry breaking. EW chiral Lagrangian. Unitarity and perturbativity of the SM. Higgs mass bounds: unitarity, triviality and stability. EW precision-observables (EWPO) and renormalisation schemes. Higgs phenomenology: decays and production. Top-quark phenomenology: decays and single and pair production).

The third part is dedicated to effective field theories (Introduction. Motivation and basic concepts. Simple examples. Machinery and Tools: matching, power counting, equations of motion, running, toy models. Applications: Fermi Theory, Euler-Heinsenberg, FCNC, NRQED. The Standard Model as an Effective Field Theory: Linear and non-linear extensions. Phenomenology and constraints from precision experiments. SMEFT at the LHC and future colliders).

Readings/Bibliography

C. Giunti, C. W. Kim, Fundamentals of Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics, Oxford University Press, USA, 2007M. Schwartz, Quantum Field Theory and the Standard Model, Cambridge University Press, 2014

Teaching methods

Front teaching

Office hours

See the website of Fabio Maltoni

See the website of Davide Pagani

See the website of Alessandro Granelli