An Interactive Monograph · Volume II · In Preparation
Particles & fields
The companion volume to Hydrogenic eigenstates. Where Vol. I teaches the orbital, Vol. II teaches the particles inside it — the quarks, leptons, and gauge bosons of the Standard Model, and the fields they are excitations of.
Modern particle physics is quantum field theory: every particle is a quantum of an underlying field. This volume builds that idea from the textbook end — particle tables, Feynman diagrams, hadron construction by colour confinement — and ends at the bridge where a vibrating scalar field reveals itself as a moving particle.
§ Table of contents
- i The particle table A periodic table for fundamental particles: three generations of fermions, the gauge bosons, the Higgs. Mass, charge, spin, colour at a glance.—
- ii The mass ladder Thirteen orders of magnitude — from the sub-eV neutrino to the 173 GeV top quark — on one log-scale axis. The Standard Model's most uncomfortable plot.—
- iii Hadron builder Combine quarks. The interface enforces colour neutrality (qq̄ for mesons, RGB for baryons); the rest is bookkeeping. Build π⁺, K⁰, Λ, the proton.—
- iv Feynman diagrams Compton, β-decay, μ-decay, gluon exchange. Vertices show their coupling constants; the time axis is animatable; the matrix element is printed alongside.—
- v Fields as particles A scalar field on a line, oscillating. Excite a single Fourier mode and watch it move like a particle. The conceptual leap from QM to QFT, in one canvas.—
- vi Decay trees Pick something unstable. Watch it cascade — branching ratios, mean lifetimes, generations — until everything that remains is stable.—