Geometric approaches to particle physics

Geometric approaches to particle physics have opened up new perspectives and unifying insights. After a few historical remarks I discuss the essence of the concept of G-theory: a primordial symmetry acting on a manifold and on the fields defined on it. This is then illustrated by the finite-dimensional case of Kaluza-Klein theories and by the infinite-dimensional case of chiral anomalies in Yang-Mills theories. In the latter case, a new and unifying description of topological and global anomalies is obtained.

Electroweak effects in intermediate energy physics

Universality of lepton interactions

NONCOMMUTATIVE GEOMETRY AND GRADED ALGEBRAS IN ELECTROWEAK INTERACTIONS

The Standard Model of Electroweak Interactions can be described by a generalized Yang-Mills field incorporating both the usual gauge bosons and the Higgs fields. The graded derivative by means of which the Yang-Mills field strength is constructed involves both a differential acting on space-time and a differential acting on an associative graded algebra of matrices. The square of the curvature for the corresponding covariant derivative yields the bosonic Lagrangian of the Standard Model. We show how to recover the whole fermionic part of the Standard Model in this framework. Quarks and leptons fit naturally into the smallest typical and nontypical irreducible representations of the graded …

Problems in neutrino physics

The three “known” neutrinos νe νµ and ντ, as well as their postulated heavy companions, have been the subject of intense experimental and theoretical research over the last decade. And yet, all the basic questions that we raised when the first, controversial, results on the mass of electron neutrino from triton beta decay were announced and when the new generation of experiments on lepton family changing processes started, remain essentially unanswered, in spite of the impressive effort that went into neutrino research [1]. So we may just repeat some of these questions and then see what we know about them and what remains to be done.

European Hadron Facility

In this contribution we survey the physics potential of a facility such as EHF in somewhat general terms. In other words, we outline some fundamental questions in nuclear physics and low energy particle physics to whose advancement EHF can and will make substantial contributions, without going into specific experiments needed to answer them. It is the role of the case studies, presented in the EHF proposal(1), to illustrate the kind of experimental effort (typical beam requirements, characteristic detectors, size of experiments, etc.) needed at EHF for the physics one wishes to clarify.