Customer Reviews

Introduction to Elementary Particles

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This is the absolute must for the beginner high energy student, theorist or experimentalist , graduate or undergraduate. This should be your first book on the subject. Anything else is too hard or too naive.This is the book that will take you by the hand, do the calculations, show you the history of the subject and tell you what is important and what is not, in short show you what high energy physics is all about. It has the ultimate material and structure.

If you dont know what a quark is or why people keep talking about its color, or you have never seen Dirac's equation, or you have no idea about what a cross section may be or how to solve problems in relativistic kinematics, THIS BOOK will take you by hand, teach you and care for you. If your friends tell you how cool a Feynman diagram is but you have never seen one and would like to understand what it is, what is its meaning and how to calculate one, then this book will take you by the hand and explain it to you. It will open the secret gardens of particle physics in front of your eyes. It is full with great physical intuition, not just mathematics all over the place.

And after you feel comfortable with the first shock of the Feynman diagrams and the Dirac equation and Electrodynamics, then you can sail away to the second part of the book that covers Quantum Chromodynamics, weak interactions and gauge theories. Then and only then make the jump to the more "difficult" books.

You can read this book on your own, you dont need a professor or a course. Griffiths is there. He knows your questions and answers them beforehand (like Mandl). He is such a great pedagogist. Dear fellow student of high energy physics, take my word and at least take a look at the book in your library. I am sure that you will like it a lot.

P.S. Another book of this magnitude and style is Gordon Kane's "Modern Elementary Particle Physics". If you cannot affort to buy both then buy this one! (Sorry Dr. Kane)

David Griffiths' texts are indispensable for any beginner, and are used to "translate" more advanced texts. I used his "Quantum Mechanics" to fill in the gaps at the advanced graduate level, and his "Electrodynamics" was essential to understanding Jackson. I'm sorry that I waited so long to purchase his "Elementary Particles".

This book contains all the background that professors expect you to have already been exposed to: particle classification schemes, the November Revolution, relativistic kinematics, and fundamental force overviews. Griffiths then goes on to discuss Feynman rules, QED, QCD, electroweak and gauge theories. Griffiths also works out some essential problems, like muon decay, that you will want to see done, but I think it is done better by Lahiri and Pal (that, however, is a field theory book, which might be more advanced than is necessary to some people in particle physics).

This is a great text for anyone starting out in particle physics and for anyone who needs to review the fundamentals. My only bone with Griffiths is that sometimes more of the work is left to the reader than is appropriate (those problems worked out in gory detail are a godsend when you genuinely aren't getting the point).

It's a good thing that Griffiths has written this book about particles. So many other professors have tried but have failed miserably. Griffiths on the other hand is a gifted writer and teacher. This book is well written and easy to learn from. The text includes a chapter on bound state and another on home to calculate amplitudes from Feynmann diagrams. You won't always find mathmatical rigor in this text, but it will always be claer and readable.

Seriously, DO YOURSELF A FAVOR, BUY THIS BOOK NOW.

I find it hard to describe to you in words how much I love this book. I am just speechless! This book will take you by the hand and spoon feed you all the important concepts and calculation steps. If you are thinking of pursuing a high energy physics and trying to find the very first book to read on this subject, Griffiths is THE ONE.

Reading QFT books before this book is in my opinion a NO-GO. Trust me from someone that has been there! You lose insight immediately and get taken down hard by the unfamiliar math. Griffiths knows how to explain things and always keeps in close contact with the actual physics. You will never lose motivation / insights into what's going on.

Take my word for it. BUY THIS BOOK NOW! You will save hundreds of hours invested on other books that claim to be "good". There are none of this kind.

After Griffiths, proceed to Ryder's QFT, and then Peskins. Then and only then will you finally see the light of the day. There are not other routes to the promised land.

Like all of Griffiths' books, this is the best place to start on this particular subject. This book teaches many of the fundamentals of particle physics without getting heavily into quantum field theory. The book has the particular magic of all of his books in that it makes the difficult subject seem easy. This seems to be done in two ways. One is that Griffiths has a wonderful casual speaking style that makes it easy to follow. He is simply an excellent teacher. The other is that

he only covers the subjects that are readily simplified. His theory seems to be that on the first attempt one should learn the easy stuff and then later go back and learn the not so easy stuff that may require much more complicated mathematics. This always requires one to hit the more difficult books like Jackson, Goldstein and any advanced QFT book later in life. This has been my theory as well and this is why I appreciate his books as much as I do. In the down side this books is

probably not as successful as his E&M and Quantum books. That is simply because particle physics is a much more diverse field and a newer field and also a more difficult subject and so "Griffithizing" it is a more challenging task. However as usual no one else has done a better job.

Griffiths' book provides an ideal introduction to particle physics for the undergraduate who is desperate to find a comprehensive treatment that is truly understandable. I was greatly disappointed by Griffiths' books on electrodynamics and quantum mechanics, but he really hit the mark on this one. There is the usual introductory material on the Standard Model, relativistic kinematics, symmetries and bound states, but his presentations of QED, Feynman calculus, decays and interactions are clearly written and geared for the student who has been frustrated by the obtuseness of other so-called introductory texts. His exposition on gauge theories, the Yang-Mills field and the Higgs mechanism is elementary but enlightening and even entertaining.

Griffiths' sly wit is in great evidence in this text, and this is one of the reasons why it is so enjoyable. Although he displays a similar witty vein in his other texts, it just doesn't succeed as it does for this book. If you want to be able to calculate particle decay rates and interaction cross sections and have fun doing it, Griffiths' book is an excellent investment.

Griffiths just can't write a bad book. This book give a very clear introduction to particle physics. It covers the material very well, runs through numerous useful examples, and has problem sets with very good problems at the end of each chapter. This is one of the best physics books I've ever used (his e+m and quantum books are praiseworthy also). This is the place to start if you want to learn particle physics.

This book will get you from Griffiths' Intro to QM to Peskin & Schroeder's Quantum Field Theory. Guaranteed.

But don't buy it.

Seriously. The book was published in 1987 and a new edition is coming out this summer, in time, presumably, for the fall term. Wait for that one (neutrinos will actually have mass in this edition).

This is the perfect introduction for any student learning about particle physics, the Standard Model, or Quantum Field Theory. It introduces Feynman calculus very well, although anyone planning to continue will need Peskin & Schroeder's book as well for the details not introduced here. This book contains an excellent appendix with all formulae and rules needed for even an advanced researcher.

This books supplies what everyone needs when coming to nuclear and particle physics, a good beginning. It is intuitive and very clear and nice to read, allthough it wont supply the math rigour a grad student needs but will give an undergrad some idea of these subjects. Griffith has done a similar good job in electrodynamics (allthough there is more rigour in math)