Michael E. Peskin
e-mail:
mpeskin"@"slac.stanford.edu
telephone: (650)-926-3250
fax: (650)-926-2525
mail: Theory Group, MS 81; SLAC, Stanford University;
2575 Sand Hill Road; Menlo Park, CA 94025 USA
I am interested in all aspects of theoretical elementary particle physics,
but particularly the nature of new elementary particles and forces that
will be discovered at the coming generation of proton and electron colliders.
These particles are needed to explain symmetry-breaking in the weak
interactions and to provide an identity for cosmic dark matter. So expect
them to appear!
My new textbook Concepts of Elementary Particle Physics is now
available!
Here is a link to the
web
site of the paperback edition.
There will certainly be errors in the printed book.
Here is a link to the
page
of errata for this book. Please send me entries for this page, and I will
credit you on the web site.
The textbook An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory, by
Dan Schroeder and myself
Lectures on high energy physics,
for the public
- A public lecture
"Large Hadron Collider - Stage 2: the Search for New Particles and
Forces", presented at the SETI Institute,
July 2016.
Streaming video
of this lecture is available from the SETI Institute YouTube
channel.
- A public lecture
"Are We
Ready for a Final Theory of Physics?", presented in the Maggie and
Nick DeWolf lecture series of the Aspen Center for Physics, January
2016.
Streaming video
of this lecture is available from Grassroots TV in Aspen.
- A public lecture "Higgs Boson: SLAC and the God
Particle", presented in the Science of SLAC lecture series,
February 2014.
Streaming video of this lecture is available from the SLAC YouTube channel.
- A public lecture
"Large Hadron Collider", presented at the SETI Institute, April
2012 (just before the discovery of the Higgs boson).
Streaming video
of this lecture is available from theSETI Institute YouTube
channel.
- A public lecture
"Top Quark:
the ElusiveTruth", given at the Perimeter Institute, December 2009. Streaming video
of this lecture is available from the Perimeter Institute video archive.
- A public lecture "Profiling the Invisible: Quantum Mechanics
and the Unseen Universe", presented in the SLAC public lecture
series, February 2005. Streaming video of this lecture is available
from the
SLAC YouTube channel. The
slides from the lecture. The Java applets
described in the lecture.
- Short articles at the level of undergraduate physics
about discoveries at the Large Hadron Collider. I assume knowledge of
special relativity and familiarity with terms such as quarks, gluons,
and leptons.
- Slides from a lecture
"Dark
Matter: What is it? Where is it? Can we make it in the Lab?"
- Slides from a lecture
"Does
a left-handed
electron throw harder than a right-handed electron?"
- A radio
interview on supersymmetry, dark matter, and the Large
Hadron Collider, broadcast May 11, 2005, on
"Berkeley Groks", a science
news program on KALX 90.7 FM in Berkeley hosted by Charles Lee and Frank
Ling. The file is in MP3 format; you can play it on your iPod. The entire
program is included; my interview begins about 7 minutes in.
Lectures on topics in
high-energy physics, for scientists and students
- Draft of a new undergraduate textbook "Concepts of
Elementary Particle Physics". I would appreciate receiving any comments,
critique, or corrections on the manuscript.
- General reviews of high-energy physics and its future:
- A pedagogical
review of the theory of the weak interaction and the
Higgs boson, presented at the 2016
CERN-JINR European School of Particle Physics.
- A perspective on the Higgs boson, electroweak
symmetry breaking, and expectations for the future of particle
physics, "On the Trail of
the Higgs Boson".
- A review article on
the major
current issues in high-energy physics, presented as the
summary lecture at the 2011 Lepton Photon conference.
- A course of 4 lectures on "The
Mystery of Electroweak Symmetry Breaking", given at the
graduate school of the Humboldt University Berlin, September 2015.
- A course of 7
lectures on the Collider Physics and the LHC,
given at the 2015 GGI Winter School.
at the Galileo Galilei Institute
in January 2015.
- A review lecture: Secrets
of the Higgs Boson, given most recently at the Frascati LNS,
KEK, and the IPMU at the University
of Tokyo.
- A physics department colloquium: The
Top Quark: Yes, it is heavy, but is it essential?, given most
recently at the University of Rome, La Sapienza, and at the University of Texas, Austin.
- A physics department colloquium:
Beyond
the
Higgs Boson: Further questions and expectations for the Large Hadron
Collider, given most recently at Princeton University.
- A course of 15
lectures on the Standard Model of Particle Physics,
given at the Perimeter Scholars International
Masters program
at the Perimeter Insitute
in December 2009.
- Six lectures on physics beyond the Standard Model, organized
around the theme of models of electroweak symmetry breaking, given
at the INFN Frascati National Laboratory in June 2008:
For the morbidly curious, streaming video of these lectures can be
found on the
Frascati Web pages.
- Three lectures on "Beyond the Standard Model: the next 20 years", on
current, future, and far future high energy colliders:
- A physics
department colloquium introducing the Higgs boson,
given most recently at Harvard University.
- A physics
department colloquium introducing the CERN Large Hadron Collider,
given most recently at the SETI Institute. A video of this talk can
be found on YouTube
- A
physics department colloquium introducing the International
Linear Collider, a proposal
for the next major accelerator project in high-energy physics,
given most recently at Princeton University.
- A review article on the general subject of
physics beyond the Standard
Model.
- A review article on
the major
current issues in high-energy physics, presented as the theoretical
summary lecture at the 1999 EPS High Energy Physics conference.
- My letter to the 2013-14 P5 panel
on the future of US particle physics.
- Cosmic Dark Matter
- A brief review
of the connection between cosmic dark matter and
elementary particle physics,
arXiv:0707.1536,
Journal of the Physical Society of Japan, 76, 111017 (2007).
- A physics department colloquium:
"Dark Matter in the Cosmos and in the Lab", given at UCLA and elsewhere.
This lecture discusses
the evidence for the existence of Dark Matter
and estimates of its abundance, models for the origin of Dark
Matter as an
elementary particle, methods for detection of dark matter in astrophysics,
and methods for discovering and studying the dark matter particle at
high-energy accelerators. This material is presented at greater length
in the lecture series that I presented as the 2006
Leigh Page Prize Lectures at Yale University:
- A paper "Determination of Dark Matter
Properties at High-Energy Colliders", Phys. Rev. D74, 103521 (2006),
written with Ted Baltz, Marco
Battaglia and Tommer Wizansky, that explains the role that high-energy
physics has to play in understanding of the origin and the distribution
of dark matter. This material is also presented in the slides of
a lecture
"A Particle Physicist Looks at Dark Matter", given at CITA (University of
Toronto), Princeton University, Johns Hopkins University, and elsewhere.
- A short paper
"The Role of the
ILC in the Study of Cosmic Dark Matter",
written with Marco Battaglia, that explains how data from
future high-energy physics
experiments will be used to uncover
the origin of cosmic dark matter.
- A lecture
"Laboratory Astrophysics from MeV to TeV", explaining the connection
between
recent developments in cosmology and high-energy physics experiments
at the next generation of accelerators, given as the colloquium at Fermilab.
A related lecture which concentrates on the issue of cosmological
dark matter,
"Laboratory Astrophysics of Supersymmetry and Dark Matter", was given
as the theory colloquium at the Unversity of British Columbia.
- The Higgs boson
- A pedagogical
review of the theory of the weak interaction and the
Higgs boson, presented at the 2016
CERN-JINR European School of Particle Physics.
- A review lecture: Secrets
of the Higgs Boson, given most recently at the Frascati LNS,
KEK, and the IPMU at the University
of Tokyo.
- A physics
department colloquium introducing the Higgs boson,
given most recently at Harvard University.
- A lecture on the future of
studies of the Higgs boson discussing in particular, the opportunity
offered by the International
Linear Collider: "The Higgs Boson
at the ILC". The capabilities of ILC for precision Higgs boson
measurements, and comparison to the projected capabilities of the LHC,
are examined in my paper
arXiv:1312.4974.
- A course of 4 lectures on "The
Mystery of Electroweak Symmetry Breaking", given at the
graduate school of the Humboldt University Berlin, September 2015.
- A physics department colloquium:
Beyond
the
Higgs Boson: Further questions and expectations for the Large Hadron
Collider, given most recently at Princeton University.
- A set of review lectures on models in which a light Higgs boson is
composite or strongly interacting, given as the 2014 PCTS lectures at
Princeton University:
- A set of introductory lectures on the Higgs boson and the breaking
of the symmetry of the electroweak interactions,
given at the 2011 SLAC Summer Institute:
- A lecture,
"Should we
really believe there is a light Higgs boson?",
given at the Fermilab Higgs Workshop, May 2001.
- Supersymmetry
- Extra Space Dimensions
- Top quark
- A physics department colloquium: The
Top Quark: Yes, it is heavy, but is it essential?, given most
recently at the University of Rome, La Sapienza, and at the University of Texas, Austin.
- A physics department colloquium
"The
top top ten list",
given at the Frascati National Laboratory, McGill University, the
University of Toronto, and the ITP in Beijing.
- QCD
- A physics department colloquium on new developments in QCD calculation
for LHC physics:
"Stampede
of the Wild Gluons",
given at the Perimeter Institute and the University of Victoria.
- Perturbative QCD for the Large Hadron Collider is presented in
my course Physics
450, given at Stanford in the fall of 2008.
- A set of pedagogical lecture notes on QCD computation for colliders,
"Simplifying Multi-Jet
Computation", arXiv:1101.2414. These notes cover spinor
product methods, color ordering, MHV amplitudes, and BCFW recursion.
I hope that they make these methods available to all students of
particle physics. A set of slides on this
material can be found here.
- Precision measurements of the electroweak interactions
- A lecture,
"A
Decade of Precision Electroweak Measurements", given as the
physics department colloquium at UC Davis, UC Riverside, UC Santa Barbara,
and elsewhere.
- A brief review,
intended for scientists outside of high-energy physics,
on the current situation in precision electroweak physics. This article
has been
published, in a somewhat more compact form, in
Science, vol. 281, p. 1153 (1998).
- CP violation
- A brief review, intended for scientists outside
high-energy physics, of the new experimental results in CP violation.
A shorter version of this article appeared as a News and Views piece in
Nature, vol. 419, p. 24 (2002).
- Statistics
- Lectures from the
SLAC Theory
Group Statistics Week, introducing
the concepts of statistics and their application to elementary particle
physics. These include two lectures of mine on "Basic Training in
Statistics".
Physics and experiments at the International Linear Colider (ILC)
- "Physics Case for
the 250 GeV Stage of the International Linear Collider"
- A brief review of the physics case for the ILC.
- A review lecture: Secrets
of the Higgs Boson, given most recently at the Frascati LNS,
KEK, and the IPMU at the University
of Tokyo.
- The ILC Technical Design Report (2013). Volume 2 gives
the most thorough and readable account of the physics opportunities that the
ILC will provide.
- A lecture on the future of
studies of the Higgs boson discussing in particular, the opportunity
offered by the International
Linear Collider: "The Higgs Boson
at the ILC". The capabilities of ILC for precision Higgs boson
measurements, and comparison to the projected capabilities of the LHC,
are examined in my paper
arXiv:1312.4974.
- A
physics department colloquium introducing the International Linear
Collider,
given most recently at Princeton University.
- A talk from 2010 on the
current
status of the ILC physics and technology
- The
Linear Collider Physics Resource Book for Snowmass 2001, prepared by the
American Linear Collider Working Group.
- A report from the American Linear Collider Working Group:
"The Case for a 500 GeV e+e- Linear Collider".
- A short course on physics at e+e- linear colliders, intended for
graduate students in experimental high-energy physics, given at Fermilab,
SLAC, and CINVESTAV:
- Three lectures on "Beyond the Standard Model: the next 20 years", on
current, future, and far future high energy colliders, given at the
2007 ILC Physics Workshop at KEK:
- A
formal review
article, with Hitoshi Murayama, on the planned physics program
of a 500 GeV--1.5 TeV e+e- linear collider. This article has been
published in
the Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science,
vol. 46, p. 533 (1996).
- A Web page with
extensive
links to LC physics resources.
- High-level panels that have reviewed the ILC often ask about
the physics
justification for the ILC in the light of expected discoveries at the
CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Here are papers written to answer this
question:
- Material on the connection of the Linear Collider experiments to
cosmology
- Additional lectures and explanatory material for the Linear Collider
- Technical material for Linear Collider physics simulation
Physics and experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
- A physics
department colloquium introducing the CERN Large Hadron Collider,
given most recently at the University of Iowa and Iowas State University.
- A course of 7
lectures on the Collider Physics and the LHC,
given at the 2015 GGI Winter School.
at the Galileo Galilei Institute
in January 2015.
- A physics department colloquium:
Beyond
the
Higgs Boson: Further questions and expectations for the Large Hadron
Collider, given most recently at Princeton University.
- Short articles at the level of undergraduate physics
about discoveries at the Large Hadron Collider. I assume knowledge of
special relativity and familiarity with terms such as quarks, gluons,
and leptons.
- The Web page of my course at Stanford on
LHC Physics.
- The Web page of the
West Coast
LHC Theory Network
- A physics department colloquium
"The
top top ten list",
proposing the top ten top quark measurements to be done at the LHC,
given at the Frascati National Laboratory, McGill University, the
University of Toronto, and the ITP in Beijing.
- A physics department colloquium on new developments in QCD calculation
for LHC physics:
"Stampede
of the Wild Gluons",
given at the Perimeter Institute and the University of Victoria.
- A physics department colloquium
"Observing
Dark Matter and its Heavy Partners at the CERN Large Hadron Collider",
given at Columbia University. The material in this talk is discussed at
greater length in a series of lectures given at the 2007 retreat of
the MIT Center for
Theoretical Physics:
- A lecture
"Generic
Signatures of New Physics at the LHC",
given at the SLAC ATLAS forum, August 2006.
Top-cited papers in high-energy physics
Annually, the SLAC SPIRES bibliographic database announces the
40 most highly cited papers of the previous year
in high-energy physics. For several years, I wrote
a review of the developments in physics of which
these papers were a part:
- 2003
Edition: Cosmology; Neutrinos; Extra Space Dimensions; String Theory
- 2002
Edition: Neutrinos; Cosmology; Extra Space Dimensions; String Theory
- 2001
Edition: String Theory; Extra Space Dimensions; Cosmology; Muon g-2;
Neutrinos
- 2000
Edition: M-Theory; Non-Commutative Field Theory;
Extra Space Dimensions; Cosmology; Neutrinos
- 1999
Edition: Strings and Branes; Neutrinos; Extra Space Dimensions;
CP Violation
- 1998
Edition: Strings and Branes; Neutrinos
- 1997
Edition: M Theory; Experimental Developments; Supersymmetry Phenomenology
My physics courses at Stanford
The Web pages for physics courses I have taught at Stanford since Fall 2000
are indexed
below. Each page contains the course syllabus, problem sets, and
complete scanned lecture notes.
- Electrodynamics for undergraduate physics majors:
Physics 120,
Physics 121,
Physics 124;
taught Fall 00 through Spring 01; Winter 02 through Fall 02;
essay: "How to Write
Maxwell's Equations on a T-Shirt".
- Quantum Mechanics for undergraduate physics majors:
Physics 130,
taught Winter 13; Physics 134,
taught Spring 12.
- Introduction to Elementary Particle Physics:
Physics 152/252,
taught Spring 14, Spring 15, Spring 16.
- Classical Particle Mechanics:
Physics 210,
taught Fall 10.
- Fluid Mechanics:
Physics 211,
taught Winter 08, Winter 09, Winter 10.
- Statistical Mechanics:
- Physics 212,
taught Fall 20, Fall 21, Fall 22.
- Physics 212 with a
more basic syllabus, taught in Spring 07, Spring 08, Spring 10.
- Quantum Field Theory:
- LHC Physics:
Physics 450,
taught Fall 06, Fall 08.
- Introduction to Supersymmetry and Supergravity:
Physics 451;
taught Winter 03.
Here are some short courses that I have given at other places:
- Standard Model of Particle Physics, a course given at the
Perimeter Scholars International program of the Perimeter Institute in
December 2009 and in January 2011:
PSI Standard
Model.
- Lectures from the
SLAC Theory
Group Statistics Week, introducing
the concepts of statistics and their application to elementary particle
physics. These include two lectures of mine on "Basic Training in
Statistics".
- A course of 7 lectures given at the
Galileo Galilei Institute Winter School, January 2015:
"Collider
Physics".
- A course of 4 lectures given at the
graduate school of the Humboldt University Berlin, September 2015: "The
Mystery of Electroweak Symmetry Breaking".
Computer tools for physics
Articles on scientific publishing
Here is a copy of my
CV and list of publications.
`Whereever you go', said the Patriarch, `I'm convinced you'll come to no
good. So remember, when you get into trouble, I absolutely forbid you to say
that you are my disciple. If you give a hint of any such thing I shall flay
you alive, break all your bones, and banish your soul to the Place of
Ninefold Darkness, where it will remain for ten thousand aeons.' `I certainly
won't venture to say a word about you,' promised Monkey. `I'll say I found
it all out for myself.'
--from A Journey to the West, by Cheng-En Wu, tr. by Arthur Waley
"If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise."
-- from the Proverbs of Hell, by William Blake.
SLAC
