This book grew-how could it be otherwise?-out of a series oflectures which the author held at the University of Heidelberg. The purpose ofthese lectures was to give an introduction to the phenomenology of elementary particles for students both of theoretical and experimental orientation. With the present book the author has set himself the same aim. The reader is assumed to be familiar with ordinary nonrelativistic quantum mechanics as presented, e.g., in the following books: Quantum Mechanics, by L.1. Schiff (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1955); Quantum Mechanics, Vol. I, by K. Gottfried (W.A. Benjamin, Reading, Ma., 1966). The setup of the present book is as follows. In the first part we present some basic general principles and concepts which are used in elementary particle physics. The reader is supposed to learn here the "language" of particle physics. An introductory chapter deals with special relativity, of such funda­ mental importance for particle physics, which most ofthe time is high energy, i.e., highly relativistic physics. Further chapters of this first part deal with the Dirac equation, with the theory of quantized fields, and with the general definitions of the scattering and transition matrices and the cross-sections.

Table of Contents:
I Relativistic Kinematics and Quantum Fields.- 1 Introduction.- 2 The Theory of Special Relativity and Relativistic Kinematics.- 3 Particles and Fields.- 4 The Dirac Equation and the Dirac Field.- 5 The Scattering Matrix and the Scattering Cross-Section.- II Quantum Electrodynamics.- 6 Introductory Remarks.- 7 The Quantization of the Free Electromagnetic Field.- 8 Further Aspects of the Theory of the Free Dirac Field.- 9 Electromagnetic Coupling and the Perturbation Expansion.- 10 Simple Reactions in Quantum Electrodynamics.- 11 The Muon and Muon Pair Production in Electron–Positron Annihilation.- 12 External Fields.- 13 Positronium.- 14 Radiative Corrections.- III The Strong Interaction.- 15 Historical Overview.- 16 Phenomenology of Hadronic Reactions.- 17 Internal Symmetries of the Strong Interaction and the Quark Model.- 18 The Naïve Parton Model.- 19 The Basic Principles of Quantum Chromodynamics.- 20 Jet and Quarkonium Physics.- IV The Electroweak Interaction.- 21 From ?-Decay tothe W-Boson. A Historical Survey.- 22 The Lagrange Densities of Quantum Flavor Dynamics and of the Standard Model.- 23 Decay Processes in the Standard Model and the Determination of the Quark Mixing Angles in the Charged Current.- 24 The Neutral Current and the Determination of sin2?w.- 25 The Physics of the Z-, W-, and Higgs Bosons.- 26 The System of Neutral K-Mesons and CP Violation.- 27 Order and Disorder in Elementary Particle Physics.- Appendices A Dirac Matrices and Spinors.- B The Feynman Rules of QED.- C The Groups SU(2) and SU(3).- C.1 The Group SU(2).- C.2 The Group SU(3).- D The Feynman Rules of QCD.- F The Fierz Transformation.- G The Feynman Rules for the Standard Model in the Unitary Gauge.- H The Kobayashi–Maskawa Matrix for Three Families.- I.1 General Formalism.- I.2 Application to the System of Neutral K-Mesons.- J Solutions to Selected Exercises.- References.