Undergraduate students have few opportunities to take part in a real project of particle or nuclear experiment. Some of you are affiliated with departments or faculties that have no research group of particle or nuclear experiments, or have no lecture on particle or nuclear physics.

It is in graduate courses that you take part in a real experimental project using particle beam generated by an accelerator. Here we will tell you how you should learn particle and nuclear physics before it.

We have collected links to websites of introductory physics in “Websites for learning physics” for your convenience.

First of all, you should learn nonrelativistic quantum mechanics and physics of atoms and molecules, which are lectured in departments of physics or applied physics in faculties of science or engineering as part of third year courses or earlier. It is not enough to read books for the public. Your learning should be through lectures, exercises, and standard textbooks or collections of problems for undergraduate students.

Studying particle and nuclear physics before learning quantum mechanics is reckless and ineffective;
it is just as pouring water into a bucket with a hole.

If you are sure that you are familiar with quantum mechanics, read through a popular book on particle and nuclear physics.Those that are relatively new and have less pages are better.

In particle and nuclear physics, you will often find many technical terms you do not see in your daily life, such as antiparticle, quark, lepton, hadron, meson, baryon, isospin, parity, flavor, gluon, weak boson, etc. At this stage it is enough to get used to them. It is just as making a table of characters by reading a digest version of a long novel before reading it. If you find anything you do not understand, you do not have to worry about it. The important point is to get a general view of this field by reading through them.

-“From X-rays to Quarks” by E. Segre (W H Freeman & Co (Sd) (1980/10))
-“The Cosmic Onion” by F. Close (Heinemann Educational Publishers (1984/05))

*Concerning the books on "superstring" or "string theory", we recommend to read them much laterm after you learn the standard model of particle physics.

If lectures on particle and nuclear physics are given in your university, attending them is the best way to learn them. It is also a good way that you read through a textbook. There are many textbooks for undergraduate students nowadays. You should learn both particle and nuclear physics, because performing particle experiments requires basic knowledge of nuclear physics, and performing nuclear experiments requires that of particle physics.

The important point in this step is that you do not have to stick to details. What you should do is to get an overview of this field. You should know, for example, what is the purpose of this field, what research have been done so far, and what is interesting in this field. If you have anything you do not understand, you do not have to be bothered by it.

*To describe phenomena in particle and nuclear physics precisely, you need advanced quantum mechanics, relativistic quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. Those are beyond undergraduate level. Authors of textbooks for undergraduate students are struggling to explain those phenomena without such advanced knowledge. So you will often encounter things beyond your understanding. It is neither your fault nor the authors’. Rather, it may be good for your future research to keep yourself questioning instead of swallowing them with no doubt.

*Many of so-called “intuitive explanations” can be understood only after detailed calculation. If you do not understand those explanations, it never indicates that you lack physical intuition for understanding this field.

-“Particles and Nuclei: An Introduction to the Physical Concepts” by B. Povh et al. (Springer-Verlag; 3rd edition (2002/08))

So far we have enumerated what should be done in the undergraduate course. In the graduate course, you will read advanced textbooks by turns under the guidance of tutors in your research group, as well as attend lectures. Through them you will acquire full knowledge of the details of the physics.

The following standard textbooks or those of the same level are often read by turns in research groups of particle and nuclear physics in the graduate schools in Japan.

- H.Frauenfelder and E.M.Henley “Subatomic Physics, 2nd edition” (Prentice Hall, 1991)
- W.S.C. Williams “Nuclear and Particle Physics” (Oxford, 1991)
- R.N.Cahn and G.Goldhaber “The Experimental Foundations of Particle Physics” (Cambridge, 1989)
- D.H.Perkins “Introduction to High Energy Physics, 4th edition” (Cambridge, 2000)
- K.Heyde “Basic Ideas and Concepts in Nuclear Physics, 3rd edition” (Institute of Physics, 2004)

Indeed, items shown in “fundamental knowledge of physics” in “Minimal requirements” are prerequisite for starting immediately to read the above textbooks by turns.

*Textbooks of particle physics are classified into the following two types:

• -bottom-up type
  
  • Phenomena in particle physics are explained in the historical order, leading to the “standard model” (gauge theory) in the end.
• -top-down type
  
  • The “standard model” is given first, and then phenomena in particle physics are explained by using it.

Our advice to students in experimental groups is that the first textbook you read should be of the bottom-up type, and after reading it you should learn the standard model through one of the top-down type.

It is not too late to study relativistic quantum mechanics and quantum field theory after reading those textbooks.

To perform particle and nuclear experiments, you need knowledge of hardware for the measurement and statistics for data processing. Such knowledge is not what should be learned through books beforehand. The right way is to do work experience in the actual experimental projects, doing things yourself with the help of collaborators (and confirm what you have learned through it reading textbooks later). It is boring and ineffective to read textbooks on hardware and statistics without experience (just as learning how to swim on the floor).

If your undergraduate course has lectures on experimental physics or radiation measurement, you can learn elementary technique of measurement and data processing in particle and nuclear experiments by attending them. As to statistics, knowledge learned through lectures and textbooks for students in the first and second year of undergraduate courses will suffice for the moment.

The above opinions strongly reflect the author’s personal experience and taste. So they may not be generally accepted and thought of as standard. You should consult your advisor and ask him or her for an appropriate advice. Moreover, in addition to the above books, there are many other good ones.

Finally, we will give you personal advices:

• “QED: the strange theory of light and matter” (Princeton, 1985) by R. P. Feynman,
  “The Feynman Lectures on Physics, volume III, Quantum Mechanics” (Addison Wesley) (especially 11-5 The neutral K-meson)by R. P. Feynman,
  are the best ones as introductions to particle physics.
  


• “The Particle Odyssey” (Oxford, 2002) by F. Close, M. Marten, and C. Sutton has many beautiful photographs of accelerators and measuring devices used in particle and nuclear experiments, and pictures of experimental data. You will enjoy it and also find it a good textbook for learning.
  
  
• In fact it is classical electromagnetism that is the most useful for particle and nuclear experiments. We recommend that in the undergraduate course you learn it to the high level so that you can discuss radiation of electromagnetic wave with Maxwell equations. Although in Japan there are not so many lectures on advanced classical electromagnetism, you have to keep it in mind that for graduate students in the United States it is obligatory to read “Classical Electrodynamics, 3rd edition” by J. D. Jackson (John Wiley & Sons, 1999).