The past couple of weeks I’ve been busy juggling research with an opportunity I couldn’t pass up: the chance to give lectures about the Standard Model to Cornell’s undergraduate summer students working on CMS.
The local group here has a fantastic program which draws motivated undergrads from the freshman honors physics sequence. The students take a one credit “research in particle physics course” and spend the summer learning programming and analysis tools to eventually do CMS projects. Since the students are all local, some subset of them stay on and continue to work with CMS during their entire undergraduate careers. Needless to say, those students end up with fantastic training in physics and are on a trajectory to be superstar graduate students.
Anyway, I spent some time adapting my Feynman diagram blog posts into a series of lectures. In case anyone is interested, I’m posting them publicly here, along with some really nice references at the appropriate level.
There are no formal prerequisites except for familiarity with particle physics at the popular science/Wikipedia level, though they’re geared towards enthusiastic students who have been doing a lot of outside [pop-sci level] reading and have some sophistication with freshman level math and physics ideas.
The whole thing is an experiment for me, but the first lecture earlier today seems to have gone well.
